The Age of Atheists: How We Have Sought to Live Since the Death of God (37 page)

The Future of an Illusion
, published in 1927, was an all-out assault, a polemic of just ninety-eight pages in which Freud, then already seventy-one, dismissed outright the truth claims of religion and foresaw its continued demise. In the 1920s, psychoanalysis was becoming established internationally—the Vienna Psychoanalytic Institute was formed in 1924, the same year that the Institute of Psychoanalysis opened in London, while a Paris outfit was opened two years later. More personally, Freud had detected a benign growth in his mouth in 1923, a leukoplakia associated with smoking. But this would develop into a cancer, about which his doctor failed to inform him at first, worried that he might commit suicide. From the late 1920s, Freud was in almost constant pain.

In
The Future of an Illusion
, he began by considering the cultural and psychological significance of religion. He said that the principal task of culture, “its real
raison d’être
,” was to defend mankind against nature. God, or the gods of the ancients, had the same threefold task: “they must exorcise the terrors of nature, they must reconcile one to the cruelty of fate, particularly as shown in death, and they must make amends for the sufferings and privations that the communal life of culture has imposed on man.”
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This is where Freud’s idea of the soul comes in. Since it is obvious
that man succumbs to fate, is often overwhelmed by nature, and invariably dies, only an element detached from the body—the soul—is capable of being perfected, and offers the chance of a new kind of existence after death. The soul is a psychological entity, not a theological one.

But Freud also claimed that “society knows very well the uncertain basis of the claims it makes for its religious doctrines.” And here he begins his polemic: he was essentially arguing that there is something intellectually dishonest about the claims that religions make in modern society. He insists, for instance, that all the arguments for the authenticity of religious doctrines “originate in the past” and that we should look to the present to see whether evidence is available. None of the “spiritualists,” as he calls them, referring implicitly to the contemporary doctrines of Madame Blavatsky, Rudolf Steiner and others, have “succeeded in disproving the fact that the appearances and utterances of their spirits are merely the productions of their own mental activity”—in fact, he disparages them as “foolish” and “desperately insignificant.”

He is equally dismissive of arguments that claim truths must be “inwardly felt,” that “one does not need to comprehend them.” This, he says starkly, is an attempt to “evade” the problem. And the philosophy of “as if” was an absurd evasion. Some people (he is referring here predominantly to the ideas of Hans Vaihinger) go so far as to say that, even if it could be proved that religion “was not in the possession of the truth,” we should believe “as if” it were, in the interests of “the preservation of everybody” and because countless people find consolation in the doctrines of religion. Freud contemptuously turns away from this, saying it is a purposeless cruelty; “with the confession of absurdity, or illogicality, there is no more to be said.”
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This leads him to consider the psychical origins of religious ideas, and to this statement: “These, which profess to be dogmas, are not the residue of experience or the final result of reflection; they are illusions, fulfillments of the oldest, strongest and most insistent wishes of mankind; the secret of their strength is the strength of these wishes.” Which in turn leads him to his famous distinction between errors and illusions. Aristotle’s belief that vermin are evolved out of dung was an error, Columbus’s belief that he had discovered a new sea route to India was an illusion, the difference being
this: “It is characteristic of an illusion that it is derived from men’s wishes.” Illusions are not necessarily errors, he says. “A poor girl may have an illusion that a prince will come and fetch her home. It is possible; some such cases have occurred.” Freud is very caustic about religious illusions: some of them are so improbable, so incompatible with the knowledge we have built up, he says, that they border on
de
lusions.
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And then this: “Where questions of religion are concerned people are guilty of every possible kind of insincerity and intellectual misdemeanor.” In particular, the meaning of the word “God” has been stretched into “vague abstractions.”

Warming to his theme, he asserts that culture incurs a great danger by maintaining its present attitude to religion, that religion has had quite long enough to show what it can achieve, and that if it were the success it claims to be, people would not be trying to change things. “But instead what do we see? We see that an appallingly large number of men are discontented with civilization and unhappy in it, and feel it as a yoke that must be shaken off.”

To him the reason is clear. Religion no longer claims the support it once did, not because its promises have become smaller “but because they appear less credible to people.” And this is so because of “the increase of the scientific spirit in the higher strata of society”; science he describes, also in
The Future of an Illusion
, as offering “opportunities for mental awakening.”
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It would be an undoubted advantage, Freud says, to “leave God out of the question altogether” and admit honestly the purely human origins of all cultural laws and institutions—then men would realize that the rigidity of many laws need not be immutable, which would be “an important advance on the road which leads to reconciliation with the burden of culture.”
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In fact, he thought that religious belief was on an inexorable decline and that, although in the past the consolations of religion had worked (“by accepting the universal neurosis [man] is spared the task of forming a personal neurosis”), the time had now come to replace the consequences of repression (required by culture) with “the results of rational mental effort,” a psychoanalytic treatment, as it were, of society as a whole. In any case, “The truths contained in religious doctrines are . . . so distorted and systematically disguised that the mass of mankind cannot recognize them as truth.”
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As one might expect, Freud was critical of the effects of a religious upbringing on children. He thought that the average child is not naturally interested in God, but is introduced to the idea by parents who, in doing so, transform the “radiant intelligence of a healthy child” into the “feeble mentality of the average adult.” “So long as a man’s early years are influenced by the religious thought-inhibition . . . we cannot really say what he is actually like.”
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THE PLEASURE PRINCIPLE

Freud had finished
The Future of an Illusion
in the autumn of 1927. During the following two years, no doubt on account of illness, he produced very little. But in the summer of 1929 he began another book, once more on a “sociological subject.” The original title he chose was
Das Unglück in der Kultur
(Unhappiness in Civilization), but
Unglück
was later changed to
Unbehagen
, a word difficult to translate into English. Freud, who spoke English well, suggested “Man’s Discomfort in Civilization,” but it was Joan Riviere, his translator, who came up with the form of words by which we know this work,
Civilization and Its Discontents.

In some ways the original title would have been better, though since the book went to press in the immediate wake of the Wall Street crash, which occurred at the end of October that year, it is easy to see why it quickly achieved the resonance it did. Its main theme is, in the words of its English editor, “the irremediable antagonism between the demands of instinct and the restrictions of civilization.”
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It was in this book that Freud claimed that many people acknowledged an “oceanic feeling” as the basis of their religious belief, a feeling which, he said, he had never experienced himself. “The ‘oneness’ with the universe which constitutes [the] ideational content [of the ‘oceanic feeling’] sounds like a first attempt at a religious consolation, as though it were another way of disclaiming the danger which the ego recognizes as threatening it from the external world.” The question of the purpose of human life “has been raised countless times” but it had never yet received a satisfactory answer “and perhaps does not admit of one.” He acknowledged that some
had said that if life had no purpose, it would lose all value for them, but he dismissed this. “Nobody talks about the purpose of life of animals, unless, perhaps, it may be supposed to lie in being of service to man. . . . It looks, on the contrary, as though one had a right to dismiss the question, for it seems to derive from the human presumptuousness, many other manifestations of which are already familiar to us . . . the idea of life having a purpose stands and falls with the religious system.”

His own offering was much more down-to-earth: “[W]hat decides the purpose of life is simply the program of the pleasure principle. This principle dominates the operation of the mental apparatus from the start.” Freud thinks that there can be no other purpose of life than “happiness.” This was not the purpose of creation, he says, adopting a Darwinian view, and for that reason what we call happiness comes from the “sudden satisfaction of needs which have been dammed up to a high degree in civilization,” and thus by its nature it is “only possible as an episodic phenomenon. When any situation that is desired by the pleasure principle is prolonged, it only produces a feeling of mild contentment. We are so made that we can derive intense enjoyment only from a contrast and very little from a state of things. Thus our possibilities of happiness are restricted by our constitution. Unhappiness is much less difficult to experience.”
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THE FOUR PALLIATIVES

For Freud, then, existence is something of a burden, and “in order to bear it we cannot dispense with palliative measures”—analgesic, cultural and psychological tools and techniques—to help us get through. He specifically identifies four palliatives: religion, art, love and intoxication. Belief in a loving God and a blissful afterlife are “wish-generated beliefs,” illusions, which serve to soften the harsh realities of life. But, he said, “even religion cannot keep its promise. If the believer finally sees himself obliged to speak of God’s ‘inscrutable decrees,’ he is admitting that all that is left to him as a last possible consolation and source of pleasure in his suffering is an unconditional submission. And if he is prepared for that, he could probably have spared himself the
détour
he has made.”
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Art, he thought, was a more respectable palliative, but not available to everyone; and even for those for whom it is, he didn’t think it was anything other than a mild pleasure—it did not “convulse our physical being.” Love, he thought, was the most sought-after palliative, which provided enormous comfort and, in sex, the most intense experiences. But it also carried enormous risks, since “we are never so defenseless against suffering as when we love, never so helplessly unhappy as when we have lost our loved object or its love.” He thought that intoxication (and he himself took cocaine and tobacco) was the “crudest but also most effective” method for ameliorating sensations of suffering. He added the important qualification that we should not look for the whole of our satisfaction from a single aspiration.

While Freud believed that a lot of our misery comes from the restrictions of civilization, he did not dismiss technological progress. On the contrary, he said that we ought not to infer that “technical progress is without value for the economics of our happiness,” that it was difficult to gauge how happy or otherwise people had been in the past, and that the values of cleanliness, order and justice, three of the most important features of civilization, stemmed from our early life in the family.

He cast doubt on what we might call the St. Francis of Assisi doctrine, that universal love is the aim. Freud had two objections: “A love that does not discriminate seems to me to forfeit a part of its own value, by doing an injustice to its object; and secondly, not all men are worthy of love.” He thought that, broadly speaking, Schiller had it right when he said that “hunger and love are what move the world.” “Hunger could be taken to represent the instincts which aim at preserving the individual; while love strives after objects, and its chief function, favored in every way by nature, is the preservation of the species.”
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He further felt that the education of the day concealed from children the part that sexuality would play in their lives, which hindered their integration into a human community which “appears as a scarcely avoidable condition which must be fulfilled before the aim of happiness can be achieved.”

Freud concluded by reasserting that he had attempted to guard himself against “the enthusiastic prejudice which holds that our civilization is the most precious thing we possess or could acquire and that its path will necessarily lead to heights of unimagined perfection.” Civilization is the
work of man, not of God, and neither our future happiness nor consolation is guaranteed.

In
Moses and Monotheism
(1939), he argued that Moses was not Jewish but Egyptian. This theory was largely discredited before the ink was dry on the page but, as Michael Palmer says, that doesn’t matter, in that the argument substantiates what Freud’s other books on religion propose, that faith begins in the oedipal predicament, in each individual’s need for a father figure. Jewish monotheism originated in a particular monotheistic episode of Egyptian history, in the course of which the people rose up against their father figure and killed him, as well as abandoning their new religion (symbolized by the story of the golden calf). They sought to forget this episode and fused Moses’s identity with the Midianite Jethro, who was thus given the name Moses.
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Elsewhere, Freud characterized Christianity as son worship replacing father worship (as in Judaism).