[This series starts with the Introduction]
Part IV: The Death of the Father
The life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. Thomas Hobbes (1588 - 1679), "The Leviathan"
In the Hobbesian world in which 99% of humanity has lived, men needed God to keep from being in a chronic state of paralyzed terror. As soon as a significant portion of the population began to have the luxury of leisure and the safety of a functioning social order to protect them from the ravages of nature and fortune, God's stature began to wane. It was a slow process; rationalism did not allow for a God with a personal interest in the affairs of individual men. Man, in turn, was diminishing in stature even more rapidly than God. It is hard to believe, but it was only in the 1920's that astronomer Edwin Hubble discovered that the nebulae that had only recently been discovered in space were not clouds of gas within our galaxy but were in fact other galaxies outside of the Milky Way. In 1929, Hubble announced that not only were the galaxies unimaginably far away but they were almost uniformly moving at high velocities, away from us; the Universe was expanding. In the space of a few hundred years, we had gone from the center of the universe, with the sun revolving around us, born in God's image, to residents of a planet revolving around an average star in one of the spiral arms of a run of the mill galaxy, one among billions, with God nowhere to be seen. Even without the enhanced narcissism of the baby boomers, this was a difficult demotion for mankind to tolerate and, as with any humiliation, the response when one's narcissism is injured tends to be either despair or rage (despair turned into its opposite and directed outward.) The rage needs an object; since God had let us down, who better to blame for our painful, dawning recognition of our insignificance. Besides which, the Physicists tell us that God is not even necessary for our world to exist.
In 1882, Friedrich Nietzsche had famously declared:
God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him.
Nietzsche, as philosophers are sometimes wont to do, had presaged the turn in the zeitgeist that began with the discovery of the scientific method, the rational way to systematically understand the world around us, and culminated with Robert Oppenheimer's famous equation of man and God, when he quotes the god Shiva from the Bagavad Gita upon witnessing the first atomic bomb blast:
If the radiance of a thousand suns
Were to burst at once into the sky,
That would be like the splendor of the Mighty One...
I am become Death,
The shatterer of Worlds.
Pure rationality had come to demand that God be treated as if he didn't exist (an effort that is continuing today via the legal system, a topic for a later post) and many were and are all to happy to comply. By denying the existence of a transcendent God, the rationalists were paving the way for man to take his place. I have described elsewhere ( W(h)ither Religion, Political Deification) the disastrous consequences of the death of God for a society as well as the existence of an unconscious need for a God to exist; if we have murdered God, as some insist, then something merely human will have to be found to take its place. Whether we are talking about one's faith in overt Atheism, Communism, Secular Humanism, Multiculturalism, or some other -ism, we are describing the use of human structures to replace a transcendent God with a profane object of worship. We are now halfway to disaster.
[For a more contemporary reference to the danger of a society "murdering God", take a look at this article by Kobayashi Maru, Suicide, Atheism and a French Face Transplant, in which he points out some remarkable statistics on suicide and atheism; while correlation is not causation, the statistics are impressive and provocative.]
By destroying God as a civilizing influence, the rationalists put themselves into the position of needing a replacement. Fascism was tried and found wanting; communism was tried and found wanting (and untold millions had to die in the attempts); today a more reactionary form of Utopian fantasy ideology is in play in Islamic fascism, which will certainly be found wanting as well, though there is no way to know how many will have to die first.
This may all seem far removed from discourse on narcissism but the connection is a powerful one. Religion has been one of the most profound and useful ways to civilize those who were unfortunate enough to grow up without the requisite parental guidance and available sources of identification. Religion helps young men, especially, to channel their passions, and behave in socially acceptable ways. The Conscience, an important part of the Superego, has two parts; it offers proscriptions (Thou shall nots) and prescriptions (Thou shalls). As any parent knows, "Thou shall not" works best when there is a clear punishment available to enforce compliance. If God can no longer be invoked, the only reason to obey the law and inhibit one's own drives is fear of human authority, which at the best of times is highly corruptible and inconsistent, two attributes not ordinarily attributed to God.
If civilization depends on young men, especially, taming their instinctual drives and inhibiting the free expression of such drives and their more harmful derivatives, then we can see that our civilization has been consistently stripping away vital layers of protection, while at the same time encouraging our young people to act out their impulses; this is not a stable structure.
As an aside, I would point out that our culture routinely overstimulates our children, which is a factor in such disparate problems as hyperactivity, precocious sexual behavior, and the sexualization of relationships (via the libidinization of anxiety, which is another topic for another day). In the early days of Psychoanalysis, we only had to worry about children being overstimulated by exposure to the parental "primal scene." Those days seem quaint now (HT: Dr. Sanity):
McGill University child psychologist Rina Gupta told the Montreal Gazette that she fears explicit sexual content on television and other media is inducing kids to engage in sexual activity at an earlier age.
Gupta, a practicing child psychologist and Co-Director of the International Center for Youth, said that children are "bombarded" with soft-core pornographic imagery, including "faux lesbianism" wherever they look. "It really creates things in the minds of young people about what things should be like, sexually," said Gupta. ". . . In my private practice, it’s exceptionally clear they’re being influenced."
A study by the RAND Corporation showed that teens who saw sexual content on TV were more likely to engage in sex themselves "in the following year."
And sexual imagery is on the rise. According to researchers there has been a staggering increase in the number of sex-related scenes in television programmes since the end of the 1990’s. The Kaiser Family Foundation, a philanthropic group that studies health care, has shown that sexual content was spotted in more than 3,800 scenes on 1,100 television shows; up from about 1,900 in 1998.
[The idea of our children being sexually over-stimulated by various aspects of modern culture, and that such over-stimulation has untoward consequences, was the point I was trying, not terribly successfully apparently, to ilustrate in my post yesterday.]
We now have the media encouraging an "anything goes" ethos to sell their product to a nation of willing (and often, unwilling) voyeurs who require constantly increasing levels of stimulation in order to evoke a reaction; we have parents being told that discipline of their children is harsh and inhibiting (well, yes, it is, but that is not always such a bad idea); schools are teaching children that there is no such thing as morality or ethics beyond "tolerance", even for the intolerant and the intolerable; a generation raised to have enhanced narcissism has now raised their children to be unable to recognize the difference between right and wrong for fear their precious self esteem might be injured (a noxious misunderstanding of the concept); and we have attempted to destroy God, who is under constant assault by those who deem themselves to be morally and ethically (not to mention intellectually) superior to those of us who believe our civilization is under attack and needs all the support it can find. We almost seem to be attempting to systematically erode the underpinnings of our civilization.
We have (nearly) destroyed the Father; in my next post in this series, I will look at some of the ways in which we have destroyed the father.
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