Thirty years ago, I was a fit young
doctoral student in theology, writing a thick manuscript of over 700
pages on the Cynics for a dissertation for Professor Heikki Räisänen.
It was more prosaic reflection than scholarly work. When the
professor read the manuscript and made the appropriate editorial
notes, I was hospitalised in critical condition with staffulococcus
aureus. At that point I had one son under one year old from my first
marriage. This text and these thoughts come mainly from thirty years
ago, but I have removed the reference numbers and the 'pointless'
literature discussion. I have updated the young man's thoughts then
for today's situation with a few references to statements and events
of the moment. These age-old thoughts of a young student have
followed me through my long life into my present old age. I even run
almost as hard as I did as a young man before the damage to my heart.
Even today, this damage is no longer felt anywhere.
The millennia of nuanced Christian
tradition have almost completely disappeared from the practice and
memory of Western churches. At the same time, asceticism and
abstinence are also more generally condemned as the horror of the
Prohibition Society.
I went on Tinder for a week after my 2000 celibacy days - during which time I did not sexually touch or
even kiss a woman. Of course, like Adam in the biblical creation
story, I felt sorry for not having a suitable partner, a lovely
woman. I crossed my arms many times, praying that God would now lead
me to the right person or give me the gift of celibacy, where I would
no longer miss a woman.
On Tinder, I did not even accept
overweight peers or 80-year-old virgins, who many people thought were
just right for my age group, into a love relationship. I didn't even
start a conversation. It is not about the dignity of any human being
as such, but about the conditions of a love relationship. This
sparked a media frenzy. Undoubtedly, despite all the derision, I am
glad that there are also ideal women for my taste: an athletic, slim,
beautiful doctoral candidate. I know one. It's a different matter
whether anything more will emerge.
But do you have to have a
loved one with whom you can talk, listen, touch and be close? If
there is no such person, then, in the wise words of the Apostle Paul,
it would be right to find the 'gift of celibacy', which he himself
had, so that living in celibacy was not overwhelming. One should
therefore focus on sublimation as a mission other than the glory of
womanhood. Sigmund Freud has written about this in a very beautifully
incisive way as the basis of civilisation.
To
the heart of the history of single life
The modern
'single life' - which many Christians also take up - is more cynical
self-indulgence than the old Christian asceticism. The latter was
celibate and did not include pornography, masturbation, paid sex
services. Instead, the cynical self-sufficiency in celibacy included
the latter. The worrying thing is that Christians today get confused
between the celibate life of a Christian single person and the
self-seriousness of a cynic who blasphemes Christianity. Some 30
years ago, I wrote a 700-page English-language manuscript of my
dissertation for my professor to read on the history and confusion
of this Christian asceticism and cynical self-sufficiency. However, I
wrote my final dissertation on a completely different
subject.
Already Jacob Bernays made a consistent
identification between the Cynics and first century Judaism and
Christians. In my opinion, he confused these quite inappropriately
and contrary to the facts of history. The Bernays family is
associated not only with the (erroneous) claim that Christian
asceticism can be identified with cynical autarky, but also with the
emergence of psychoanalytic literary studies for the sake of Sigmund
Freud. Jacob Bernays was born in Hamburg in 1824 and died in Bonn in
1881. According to him, the pseudeipigraphic letter of the Cynics to
Pseudo-Heraclitus originated in the Jewish doxographic tradition in
the first century AD. The letters of Pseudo-Heraclitus criticise
immorality and traditional culture.
Pseudo-Heraclitus'
letters, which emphasised the freedom of the cynic, were seen by
Jacob Bernays as Jewish. He also concluded in his study of Lucianus
that Peregrinus, described by Lucianus as a cynic, was a Jewish rabbi
who, even as a cynic, could preach monotheism, self-righteousness and
courage in the face of corrupt authorities. Bernays did not trust
Lukianos' description of a morally degenerate Peregrinus.
Furthermore, Bernays suggested that Pseudo-Diogenes' letters 4, 7, 9
and 45 belonged to an Eastern Christian environment, but this was
soon contradicted by G. Capelle (1896) in his dissertation, who
argued that the letters rather dated from the first century BC and
reflected Socratic language and irony. According to the
Pseudo-Diogenes' letter to Hiketae (Letter 7), Diogenes is a heavenly
dog, not living according to conventional popular notions, but
following his nature, free under Zeus. The dog is under the
protection of the gods. Diogenes calls God 'Father'. According to
Bernays, this letter would be Christian or Jewish and dates back to
the 100th century AD.
Jacob Bernays' view of the proximity
between the Cynics and Judaism and Christianity in the first century
AD is particularly interesting if one takes into account the
Jewishness of Bernays' family. His life story is known in exceptional
detail. This scholar came from a prominent Jewish family of the
mid-nineteenth century. A Jewish scholar, he perceived the letters of
Pseudo-Heraclitus as Jewish. Those letters reminded us that human
hands do not make a god (Psalm-Her 4:20), but nowhere did the letters
argue from Jewish sacred authority or scripture, instead relying on
Homer. The citizenship of God was, of course, repeatedly expressed in
the letters: 'I am not a citizen among men, but among gods' (Psalm
5). The letters also recounted the unlawful measures of Ephesus that
Heraclitus faced, "all are enemies, none is a friend" (Ps.
Her. 7). Pseudo-Heraclitus 9 proclaimed world citizenship. The
textual world of the letters fitted in remarkably well with Bernays'
personal life.
Cynicism and Judaism were not presented as
close friends by just any scholar, but by Jacob Bernays, son of the
Chief Rabbi of Hamburg, Isaac Bernays. His father had died shortly
after Jacob's studies at the University of Bonn in 1849. Jacob had
completed his studies at the University of Bonn in 1844-1848, where
his teacher was Albrecht Ritschl, a pioneer of neo-Kantian
theological hermeneutics, who explicitly emphasised individual
experience of value. Shortly after his father's death, Paul Heuse
arrived in Bonn in 1850, with whom Jacob entered into a homosexual
relationship. Jacob himself never married, but Paul Heuse, who was
later awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, married and had several
children with his wife. At that stage, Jacob Bernays had not yet
taken up the study of cynics. However, it was individualism that the
cynics represented. It was the cynics who could deviate from the
prevailing way of thinking. Freedom also included sexual
self-sufficiency, to the point of allowing homosexuality. In
contrast, in 19th century Bonn, the sexual orientation of a Jewish
prisoner's son was not judged liberally.
In 1850, Lachmann
wrote his famous work on Lucretius. A good friend of Jacob Bernays,
Mommsen had become well known for his political activism in favour of
liberalism. The Jews were tolerated, but in 1861 the arrival of poor
beggar Jews from the East led to a sharp change of opinion. In the
following years, Jacob Bernays wrote several works on textual
criticism of ancient works - following Lahmann's ideals. In 1856 he
assumed that the so-called Pseudo-Fokylidean poems were by a Jewish
author, and in 1861 he published his study of Sulpicius Severus
(360-420 AD) and investigated the possibility of a Christian
interpolation of the Annals of Tacitus. In 1866 he became professor
at the University of Bonn. Three years later, Jacob Bernays concluded
that the cynical Pseudo-Heraclitean letters defending individual
liberty were in fact of Jewish origin.
In 1872, the Swiss
historian Jacob Burckhard expressed his dismay at the rush of modern
culture, which would only be exacerbated by the rise of pernicious
cosmopolitanism on account of the Jews. In September 1873, New York
experienced a 'Black Friday', a stock market crash that left many in
dire straits: in the public propaganda, Jews now represented the
exploitative international capital that was bringing productive
Germans into poverty. Jews spoke out in defence of their rights and
freedoms: in 1879, the very well-known Chief Rabbi of Vienna, Adolf
Jellinek, issued his declaration in favour of liberalism. Albert
Ritschel's major work was also completed: Ritschel consistently
emphasised the individual experience of human dignity, while
metaphysics remained inadequate. In a context of anti-Semitic
accusations and suspicion, and neo-Kantian values emphasising
intellectual individuality, it is probably no coincidence that Jacob
Bernays concluded in 1879 that the poor individualist Peregrinus was
in fact a wandering cynical Jewish rabbi, but that Lucianus had
ruined Peregrinus' reputation.
In 1881 Jacob Bernays died.
Bernays' influence is reflected in his family connection with Sigmund
Freud, to whom Jacob Bernays dedicated many of his letters. Sigmund
Freud, for his part, praised both Jacob Bernays' memory and his
medical interpretation of Aristotle's doctrine of catharsis. After
Jacob's death in 1883, Jacob's nephew Eli Bernays and Sigmund Freud's
sister Anna married. In 1882 Sigmund Freud met Jacob's niece Martha
Bernays. After a long engagement (1882-1886), Sigmund married Martha,
and in 1895 Martha's sister Minna also moved in with Sigmund. Jacob
Bernays created an image of individualistic cynics related to Jews
and Christians. The Cynics represented individualism: this fitted in
with neo-Kantian intellectualism in the 19th century, when, as
anti-Semitism grew, Jews perceived institutionalism as a threat to
the noble ideals of liberalism. Nor can Bernays' personal sexuality
be ignored in assessing the scholar's sympathy for the interpretation
of cynicism as Judaism. Under the influence of Jacob Bernays, the
medical interpretation of catharsis moved into Sigmund Freudian
therapy and psychoanalytic literature reading.
Donald R.
Dudley also examined the history of cynicism from Antisthenes and
Diogenes to the 500s AD. Sallust. One of these cynics was Oenomaus,
who, according to Dudley, lived during the time of Hadrian. What
makes this cynic interesting is his hometown of Gadara, also known
for the Gospels. In the Hebrew tradition, the pagan philosopher
Abnimos Hagardi appeared as a friend of Rabbi Meir. However, Dudley
doubted this identification. Oenomaus would be one of the many cynics
who would embody the rise of the trend: 'in the period from the death
of Vespasian to the death of Marcus Aurelius, cynicism became
numerically much stronger than it had ever been before'.
War
had begun in Europe when, in 1937, Donald R. Dudley, in Cambridge,
wrote a sympathetic portrait of the cynics. These cynics would,
according to Dudley, expose the 'futility' of the Greek world of the
time. The ascetic laws of Christianity would be the link between the
ancient world and Christianity, to which Dudley assumed the cynics
had a direct connection. Centralising political tendencies would have
dominated the Christian world in the Middle Ages, but there were also
persistent ascetic, anti-clerical elements that would have paralleled
the Cynics' reaction against official stoicism. According to Dudley,
the greatest similarity to cynicism in modern times would be found in
anarchism. Among the political influences of anarchism were Proudhon,
Stirner and Bakun. Dudley concluded his study with the observation:
'State capitalism meant the replacement of one tyranny by another. -
In our own time, central political tendencies are again dominant. In
Germany, Italy and Russia, the state claims full power over
individuals." After the wars, Dudley did not return to studying
the cynics. His view of asceticism became more diverse when he wrote
general studies of Roman culture and compiled a study of
Lucretius.
A year after the publication of Dudley's study of
the Cynics, Farrand Sayre, an American brigadier general, completed
his doctorate in philosophy at Johns Hopkins University. Sayre's
(1938) picture of cynics was very far from sympathetic individualism.
Diogenes of Sinopea was a cynical loafer, beggar and thief. The
Cynics sought happiness through freedom, which was freedom from
anger, desire, fear, sorrow and other emotions, religious and moral
control, the authority of the city, the state and public authorities,
and public opinion. It was also freedom from the care of property,
freedom from captivity to any local attachment, freedom from the care
and maintenance of wives and children. The Cynics scoffed at the
customs and habits of others, but were strict in observing their own.
The Cynics could not arrive anywhere without their knapsacks, sticks
and cloaks, which had to remain unchanged even when dirty, tattered
and worn. The right shoulder had to be bare. A cynic would never wear
shoes. The Cynic's hair and beard were long and unkempt. The Cynics
never compiled any authoritarian canon of books, unlike the Stoics
and Epicureans. The emergence of Cynicism would have been a
consequence of the conquests of Alexander the Great, which also gave
rise to, among other things, the gymnosophists. Sayre was very
impressed by the similarities between Indian yoga practitioners and
Cynics. He could not find Greek models for these similarities. So he
assumed that the Indian influence had reached Diogenes through the
trade routes.
Sayre, a general and doctor, has been accused of
being "hasty in the use of his weapon" when he portrayed
the cynics in a one-sidedly negative way: Sayre did not make enough
of a distinction between the harsh legend and reality. In 1948, Sayre
returned to the study of the Cynics. Here he stressed that Antishenes
should not be associated with the cynic, but rather with the Socratic
philosopher. He also compiled a general survey of the Greek Cynics.
The general tone of the text remained unchanged.
Michel
Foucault was born on 15 October 1926 and died on 26 July 1984. He was
one of the most important European thinkers of the late 20th century.
In literary studies, it was Foucault, along with Sloterdijk and
Bakhtin, who brought the cynics to prominence. Michel Foucault's
father was a surgeon. Michel studied philosophy, psychology and
psychopathology at the University of Paris and the Ecole Normale, and
initially worked in a mental hospital. There was a clear personal
need for the perspectives that Foucault raised: he was defined by the
diagnostics as mentally ill. He was also homosexual. It has since
come to light that this adored philosopher also sexually corrupted
many of his male children.
Mental illness and sexuality
constantly accompanied Foucault's choices of research topics and
philosophical formations. Foucault's studies of madness, medicine and
the history of punishment opened up new perspectives on the margins
of civilisation and the ways in which power operates. Foucault's
research intentions should not be forgotten as they emerged in the
turbulent Paris of the time, where everyone was opposed to consensus.
In the end, these backgrounds also led Foucault to study the cynics,
as if also as an ideal of his own life, as an example of single
life.
In The History of Sexuality (1978), Foucault delved into
the problem of the subject. Already Nietzsche, the world had been a
construct of interest-bound values. Foucault adapted the epistemology
of Gaston Bachelard and Canguilhem to structuralist formalism and
wanted to reject Lacanian psychological explanations. Foucault asked,
"How is the experience of the self and the knowledge of the self
organized through defined, valued, recommended and imposed models?"
According to Foucault, modern man cannot escape the problem of
language because language limits man: language is how man explains
his history. According to Foucault, power shapes reality into an
object that can also become the object of scientific research.
Foucault did not deny the Lacanian recognition of language, but he
wanted to place a strong emphasis on power, which would also
subjugate language.
Foucault developed an 'aesthetics of
existence' as an ethical model, in which the ethics of virtue is an
ethics of 'good behaviour' rather than an ethics of rules and
sanctions. The study of the aesthetics of existence and the ethics of
virtue led to Foucault's study of the Cynics: whereas most had relied
on Aristotle's Nicomachean ethics, Foucault sought his starting
points in Hellenistic-Roman philosophy. Foucault stressed the
relationship of virtue to the self. "Speaking the truth"
became Foucault's final theme of research. In 1983, at a seminar in
Berkeley, he discussed cynics as truth-tellers. A Diogenes cynic
would have been a professional truth-teller who used an appropriate
technique to suit his needs. In the same context, Foucault also made
some of his assessments of Christianity.
Foucault was particularly interested
in the relationship between Christianity and sexuality in the last
decades of his life. He had, of course, made numerous references to
religion in the past. He never dealt systematically with religion.
Foucault has been seen as a post-structuralist who could only fit in
with the Nietzschean 'death of God'. However, Foucault was interested
in Christian theology and other religious traditions because of the
social changes they brought about. Foucault dealt with religion
outside the main themes of his writings, including in the context of
the Cynics. Religion was part of the 'cultural being of knowledge'.
Critically, Foucault pointed out that classical ethics, in line with
his "aesthetics of existence", was concerned with the self,
but with Christianity, morality was elevated to the foreground and
self-care began to be understood as egoism. Thus the emphasis on
sacrifice for others would be reinforced.
According to
Foucault, little is known about the doctrine of the Cynics - 'not
even whether they had an explicit doctrine'. Foucault knew the
historical problem of the origin of the Cynics from the book by
Ferdinand Sayre to which he referred. Instead, Foucault doubted
Sayre's hypothesis about the significant influence of Indian
philosophers on the Cynics. The attitudes of the Cynics could also be
understood as 'an extremely radical form of early Greek behaviour in
which there was a relationship between the way of life and truth'.
For Foucault, 'cynicism is a negative form of aggressive
individualism that emerged with the collapse of the political system
of the ancient world'.
According to Foucault, cynics were a
large and influential phenomenon in numbers from the first century AD
until the fourth century AD. Peregrine the Cynic would have been
considered a kind of saint because of his heroic death: the Cynic had
been indifferent to his death. Foucault did not refer to secondary
literature when he explained Lucian's portrait of Peregrinus. The
real point of the explanation was that the cynics were not part of
the tradition of theoretical philosophy, but of the Socratic
tradition, in which truth was accessible to all. That is why the
Cynics taught in public, performed on stages and expressed their
truth in provocative and sometimes scandalous ways. "They wanted
their own lives to be a reflection of essential truths".
Epicurus sought to personify doctrine through his life, but
cynics do not refer to philosophical texts and doctrines at all, only
to their exemplary lives. The Cynics had no fundamental texts or
recognised doctrines. It was here that Foucault saw similarities with
early Christianity: 'The idea that the life of the philosopher should
be exemplary and heroic is as important in understanding the
relationship of cynicism to Christianity as it is in understanding
parrhesia as a public activity'. Foucault did not further analyse his
argument about the analogy between Christians and cynics.
Christianity, after all, is known to have basic documents.
Already from at least the first century
onwards, a strong cynical school or school of thought has influenced
Alexandria, where also Dio of Prusa, or Dio Chrysostom (Oratio 32, Ad
Alexandrinos 9) has met cynics. Demetrius of Sunium also felt the
influence of Cynicism in Egypt (Lucianus, Toxaris 27). In the 300s,
the Emperor Julianus of Luopio, or Flavius Claudius Julianus (Oratio
6), severely rebuked the Egyptian Cynics. In introducing cynical
parrhesia, Foucault went on to draw links with Christianity. The main
types of cynical parrhesia would be (1) critical teaching, (2)
scandalous behaviour and (3) provocative dialogue. The Stoics would
have taught a small audience, but the Cynics despised elitist
exclusivism. The Cynics were geared to large crowds, speaking in
theatres and wherever people were gathered, at religious events and
sporting competitions. Foucault finds evidence of public speaking
situations as far back as the Sophists of 400 BC. The role of the
Cynics was to bring the theories of philosophy into the public domain
and to draw people's attention to those outside the philosophical
'chosen few'. Foucault summarised the affinity with the Christians:
the Cynics' discourses of freedom and renunciation of luxury, their
critique of political institutions and their criticism of existing
morality would open the way to some Christian themes. Christian
proselytes not only often spoke on similar themes to the Cynics, but
also carried it out with a similar rhetoric.
Foucault summed
up the meaning of the Cynics as the truth had to be told and taught
to everyone, not just the best members of society and exclusivist
groups. Today, more attention is paid to theoretical doctrine than to
the philosophers' way of life, while the old way of thinking,
according to Foucault, should be restored. The Cynics would not have
constructed a doctrine that points to good or evil, but would have
presented their freedom and self-sufficiency as the basic criteria of
life. The main elements of human happiness would be autarchy,
self-sufficiency, and autonomy. Therefore, natural life would require
all independence from culture, society, civilization and opinion. For
Diogenes, the natural thing, eating, was not scandalous, so he was
allowed to eat in public in the marketplace. Foucault points out that
Diogenes' teaching means that masturbation cannot be wrong. Both
events would be about satisfying the needs of the body.
For
Foucault, it was important that for the Greeks, the encounter between
faith and truth did not initially take place the Cartesian conception
of truth as a mental experience, but the speaking of truth was a
verbal activity. The 'proof' of speaking the truth was the certainty,
the 'courage' of speaking it. Truth would be seen in the courage of
the speaker to say something dangerous against the beliefs of the
majority. The Greeks would have felt the need for an antinomy between
such parrhesia (courageous free speech) and democracy.
Michel
Foucault made scant reference to secondary literature in his Cynicism
essays. The primary sources were the speeches of Dio of Prusa, Lucian
and Diogenes Laertius. Foucault's cynicism was dominated by
'idealism', that is, the need to find a return to naturalism and a
socratic ethics, in accordance with the aesthetics of existence, in
which forms of power as erudition and systems of doctrine would not
corrupt philosophy. To that end, Foucault formed a picture of the
cynics that Crescens or Maximos, in their quest for power, could
hardly have matched. In his presentation of Christianity, Foucault
forgets the emergence of written texts (gospels and epistles) and
churches.
A true cynic wastes no
time in marriage
Demetrius is known to have taught
in Rome under Caligula. Demetrius was expelled from Rome by Nero,
after which he worked in Greece. The Stoic Seneca describes him as
the ideal cynic, who became his own master because of poverty.
Tacitus describes Demetrius with contempt. Demetrius is an
interesting piece of evidence that Paul's environment was also
influenced by a well-known cynic. The sources on Demetrius are not
written by the cynics themselves.
Cicero (106 BC-43 AD) is an
interesting witness to the Cynics because of his lifetime. Cicero's
assessment of the Cynics is very negative. The Cynics' morality was
shameful and their entire philosophical system had to be rejected.
Cynicism expressed hostility to moral reasoning. Cicero knew the term
'cynicism', and this educated Roman also knew cynics. His views on
the development of the Roman Empire were not compatible with the
cynics.
Quintus Horatius Flaccus (b. 65 BC, d. 8 AD) was
familiar with the cynics and their genre in his satires. Cynical
criticism and an ascetic emphasis did not appeal to Horace, who
respected Augustus and the fruitful era he brought (see, for example,
Carmen saeculare).
In Roman comedy (Plautus, 250-184 BC and
Terentius, 195-159 BC), cynics are referred to derisively, and not by
the cynics themselves.10 Laberius refers to the "cynical heresy"
(cynica haeresi; Compitalia, fr. 3) and Plutarch tells the story of
the courageous cynic Marcus Favonius (Brutus 34; Dio Cassius 38:7;
Dio Cassius 39:14). Petronius, who lived in the 60s AD, tells us in a
parody that Ascyltus recited a poem about cynics who 'sold words for
cash'. The critical poem is thought to show that the Cynics made
compromises between scarcity and corruption. Petronius' parody is not
unique in its depiction of cynics. Lucian also describes the cynics'
greed for money in his Philosophies for Sale, and Tatian of Syria
reproaches Crescensus and Gregorius Nazianzus Maximus for their
greed. These examples would seem to indicate that the Cynics had no
absolute moral principles which would have led them to reject the
opportunities for personal enjoyment offered to them.
Marco Terentius Varro (b. 116 BC, d. 27
BC) wrote Satirae Menippeae. Varro used the Menippean literary form,
which mixed prose and sentences in dialogues. He himself did not
adopt a cynical lifestyle. The 600 or so fragments of Varro's satire
are difficult to interpret. Varro himself did not identify with
Menippus' attack on the gods. His work is not a cynic's
self-attestation of his convictions.
Dio of Prusa, or Dio
Khrysostomos, was active at the end of the first century. Dio is said
to have evolved from a Sophist to a Cynic, in which case Dio's
speeches 6 and 8-10, among others, could characterise his cynical
period. C.P. Jones has strongly criticised Hans von Arnim and
Margarete Billerbeck, among others, for their view of Dio's cynicism.
However, Dio seems to have remained rather stoic, even though he
suffered poverty during his time as a refugee. Poverty was a
consequence of circumstances. Dio does not identify with the cynics
standing on the street corners and gates of Alexandria either, but
characterises them in a very negative way around 71-75 AD. Dio's
testimony can be seen as an eyewitness account of the cynics of the
first century.
"And as for the Cynics, as they are
called, it is true that this sect is not few in number in this city:
- - These Cynics settle in street corners, alleys and temple gates.
They put their hats about and deceive the gullible youths, sailors,
and such like in the market-places, with coarse jokes and gossip, and
base jesting' (Oratio 32:9).
G. Capelle divided the letters of
Pseudo-Diogenes into four different groups according to language,
content and tendencies. There is no consensus on the dating of the
Pseudo-Diogenes letters. Pseudo-Diogenes' letter to Crateses (letter
9) has been considered to reflect a Socratic influence in language
and ironic style. However, this letter is the only one of Diogenes'
letters under consideration that can be dated with reasonable
probability as pre-Christian. The narrative situation of the letter
is the renunciation of property. Crates had given up his property. In
the letter, Pseudo-Diogenes claims that because of this renunciation,
Krates had 'risen above popular opinion more quickly than I
expected'. This superiority manifested itself in voluntary poverty
and begging. Pseudo-Diogenes' letter provides evidence of a cynical
link between poverty and freedom of opinion. The cynic believed not
in words but in his life, because the premise was that there was no
great Other.
Pseudo-Diogenes' letter 44 to the Metroclus is
very harsh in its ascetic demands. Diogenes demands as an ascetic
programme that one should stick to water and bread for food, sleep
only on straw and wear a rough cloak. In the letter, however,
Pseudo-Diogenes shows an interest in exploring sexual asceticism
rather than poverty. He urges against 'excessive intercourse with
women' because it 'requires a great deal of free time'. According to
Diogenes, intercourse with women offers pleasure only to the
uncivilised population. The sexual asceticism understood by Diogenes
does not mean responsible sexual morality for the family man, but a
total rejection of sexual intercourse and marriage.
The cynical ideal of avoiding the
responsibilities of a family man is reminiscent of Polybius'
description of the atmosphere of Hellenistic cities. Writing in the
second century BC, the historian Polybius accuses men of being prone
to celibacy and, being greedy and lazy, unwilling to raise children.
Polybius suggests that the love of celibacy is not confined to
cynics. The prevailing conditions offered only meagre opportunities
to create an economically responsible and prosperous family life.
Family membership also played a crucial role in defining the identity
of the individual personality. In that situation, other
'philosophical' ways of defining a good enough identity had to be
found.
Cynical asceticism did not necessarily involve the
sexual restraint that modern thought associates with asceticism, but
rather the goal of asceticism was self-sufficiency - being different
from the rest of the population. To understand the glorification of
Cynical misery, it is necessary to question the possibility of the
poor Cynics even achieving the wealth and pleasure they focused on
denouncing. If luxury was not within the reach of the beggar, it
would seem that his own misery became a virtue for the cynic. The
Cynics' claims of difference from animals are not entirely convincing
either: drinking water instead of wine and resting on the earth are
also inherent to animals. The ideal misery of the Cynics was
certainly harsher than that of the common people in antiquity. The
lowest social classes dressed so similarly that it was impossible to
distinguish a poor freeman from a slave. But the Cynics wanted to be
different from the other poor. This turning to one's own internal
difference can be seen as a characteristic feature of Hellenistic
philosophy in a context in which the relative proportion of the
unstable population was increasing, the economic importance of slave
labour was growing and civil liberties were beginning to seem an
unattainable dream. In that world, autarchy, personal autonomy,
became more valued.
A few quite prominent teachers of the
early church have referred to the Cynics. Justin Martyr, in his
Second Apology, refers to cynicism and to Crescens' "cynical
indifference" to the end and to truth. According to Justinus,
the cynic would not understand the Christian's divinity - nor would
he be corruptly indifferent to the truth. Criticised as a cynic,
Crescens found Christians suspicious because Christians interacted
with a simple crowd. The writings of Tatian and Jerome suggest that
Crescens was indeed a cynic.
Tatian was born around 120 AD. In
Syria. He wrote the Diatesseron, a composite work of the four
Gospels. According to Tatian's account, Crescens, a cynic
philosopher, persecuted both him and Justin. Justin had opened a
school in Rome, where Tatian studied. In that dispute, Tatian focused
on the moral characterisation of the cynic Crescens: Crescens
corrupted boys in homosexual relationships and was greedy for money.
After the death of Justin Martyr, Tatian joined the Enkratite
movement, which did not eat meat, drink wine or marry.
In
Tatian's 'Oration to the Greeks' (Oratio ad Graecus 25) there is a
reference to Proteus, who has sometimes been mistakenly interpreted
as the cynic Peregrine, to whose writings Tatian would have referred.
Oratio ad Graecus 25 may, of course, be a description of a cynic.
This would be money-grubbing according to Tatian, but there is no
reason to interpret Proteus as any other cynic than Crescensus, whom
Tatian has treated throughout the work. Tatian refers derisively to
the cynic Diogenes Sinope in chapter 2 of his Oratio ad Graecos:
'Diogenes, who made a parade of his independence in a barrel, was
afflicted with dyspepsia after eating raw polypi, and so lost his
life in his greed.'
Tatianus gives a very colourful
description of his disagreements with Crescens. The cynic's
homosexuality and greed for money are the subject of his reproach.
Tatian does not see cynicism as asceticism, but as self-seriousness,
which also leads to immorality. Tatian reproaches Crescens for
favouritism (Oratio ad Graecos 19). After the death of Justinian,
Tatian converted to the Enkratite religion. Asceticism was also found
in the Indian ascetics, in Hessianism or Pythagoreanism. Irenaeus
wrote that the Enkratite trend was derived from the teachings of
Saturninus and Marcion.
In the name of ‛Occidental
Catholicism‛, the Enkratite denomination is called a heretical
sect. In his new sect, Tatian himself saw monotheism as the correct
starting point for his morality. In contrast, Tatian's Oratio ad
Graecos was already written in Rome under the influence of Justin
Martyr. At that time, Tatian's starting point was that God had
created the world with his Word (dia logichV dunamewV). Tatian argued
for asceticism on the basis of a tripartite anthropology: man is
body, soul and spirit. He already thought at that time that creation
had been invaded by a 'spirit of the world', which was inferior to
the 'divine Spirit'. Man would not be materially and spiritually very
different from animals, but what would be special is that man was
also created in communion with the divine Spirit. The Spirit would
make man in the image of God and confer immortality after the bodily
resurrection, which Tatian defined as sharply different from the
Stoic concept.
In some of his writings, Lucian of Samosatola
describes the lifestyle of the Cynics. The theme of poverty also
appears in the satirical work Philosophies for sale. In it, the buyer
comes to the cynic. The cynic says he has come from everywhere. He is
a citizen of the world. The cynic then sells the buyer advice on how
to free himself from luxury. The High School text The Burning Murder
of Peregrine tells the story of a Christian who became a cynic: the
real Pereginus is believed to be a Jewish rabbi, an Essene Ebionite41
or a Markion. According to Lucianus, Christian charity only led to
speculation and exploitation. Therefore, Peregrinus (English:
"wanderer") may have exploited Christians. Christians held
property in common, were brothers to each other, denied the Greek
gods and lived by the laws of the crucified. In the story of
Peregrinus, Peregrinus was expelled from the church because of a food
law. Lukianos did not suggest that cynical total abandonment of
property was also practised among Christians. For Christians,
renouncing property was not a shortcut to happiness, to
self-sufficiency. Lukianos did not identify cynicism with
Christianity. The Peregrine in the Lukianos story certainly
experienced both. Lukianos rebuked both ideologies.
From Jacob
Bernays' study Lucian und die Kyniker (1879) onwards, Lukianos'
motives have been very much called into question, and his work could
not provide material to satisfy modern historical interest. Lukianos
was interested in tall tales, not the truth. Other documents about
Peregrine, though less polemical, do not provide material for a
personal history, because there is little personal information. The
reader's guide tells us almost nothing about Peregrinus' background
and youth. The Lukianos only states that Peregrinus came from a
wealthy home (Burning Murder 14). Peregrinus is thought to have been
born around 100 AD. Lucian himself was born around 115-125
AD.
Lukianos described his own view of Christian credulity in
his work Burning Murder. Peregrinus was a depraved deceiver, a
trickster who nevertheless managed to win recognition as both a cynic
and a Christian. Peregrinus succeeded in exploiting people's charity.
The distinction between cynicism and Christianity was preserved in
his own conceptual world of the High School. The satirical nature of
the work interferes with its historical accuracy.
Peregrinus
is far from being a respected philosopher with high morals. Lukianos'
attack on cynics and easily fooled Christians is a typical
generalisation of the kind that was also found elsewhere at the time.
Peregrinus cannot be regarded only as a grotesque figure of Lucian or
as a story inspired by Marcion: the works of Aulus Gellius (VIII,3),
Tertullian (Ad Martyres 4), Eusebius (Chron, vol II) and Ammianus
Marcellinus (XXIX, 1,39) are known as Peregrinus. The name Proteus is
also used.
Aulus Gellius depicts Peregrinus in his
work The Nights of Attica, which was created almost immediately after
Peregrinus' death. This work has led to much doubt about the
reliability of Lucian's account of the Burning Murder, both among
modern scholars and ancient interpreters. Aulus Gellius represents
the ideas of the learned upper class of his time. Despite his upper
classness, he described the morality of the philosopher Peregrine as
high. Aulus Gellius did not present Peregrinus as a Christian.
Gellius even seems to have visited Peregrinus during his time in
Athens. The problem with Gellius' account is its brevity: in general,
Gellius kept his subject brief and avoided unnecessary
writing.
Tertullian did not characterise Peregrine's morals in
his brief mention. He only mentioned the deadly cruelty of this
character in the context of other heroes. Tertullian did not classify
Peregrinus as a Christian. Peregrinus was only a mention among other
examples of paganism picked out from other death-defying
examples.
Tertullian's harsh demands for modesty are well
known. In his De Cultu Feminarum, Tertullian draws particular
attention to the luxury and splendour of women. Luxury would be
ambition, cruelty and debauchery. Seneca had written just as strongly
against luxury, even though he himself led a life of luxury.
Tertullian was concerned that luxury was beginning to penetrate the
church and take over the 'daughters of the church'.
In the
second book of De Cultu Feminarum, Tertullian points out that
Christian wives are not obliged to attend the old temple games, to
follow the games and to take part in pagan festivities. Fear of sin,
he says, is the basis for salvation. Women should not be encouraged
to indulge in indulgence, to which dress or extravagant behaviour
would explicitly lead. A woman should seek pleasure only for her
husband. Chaste modesty would suffice. It is useless to maintain
beauty, to conceal evil by cosmetics. Tertullian asked women who dyed
their hair whether they might want to turn to the Gauls or the
Germanic tribes? Daughters of wisdom should refrain from such
foolishness. According to Tertullian, Christian women should give up
luxurious bodily garments and adornments: 'God created the
instruments of luxury to test the self-control of mankind. A
Christian woman can have no good reason to run around in fine hemp."
Tertullian felt so devastated by the
power or inadequacy of his own sexuality that this threat was
reflected in accusations against women's independence. Women's
independence was a threat even to the original unity that God
represented. Tertullian saw desire as a pleasurable force that
created freedom in a frightening way, and that the slightest
attention to pleasure, adornment and beauty allowed by women
threatened to sever man's connection with God as well. It is by no
means clear whether these theological arguments were the consequence
of his withdrawal from sexual intercourse with his wife or an
expression of the need to subjugate her, if Tertuallianus had
experienced sexual inadequacy to satisfy his wife's desires. Thus
Tertullian perceived the woman as the devil's gateway to destroy the
man, the image of God. Thus the woman was to bear the shame and guilt
of modesty and poverty.
If faith dwelt on earth as great as
the reward of faith that awaits in heaven, not one of you, dear
sisters, would have wanted too gay (I will not say ostentatious
either) clothes from the time you first "came to know the Lord"
and learned (the truth) about your (woman's) condition. Walk,
therefore, first of all in modest apparel, and be mindful of a
trifling appearance as Eve was, mourning and repenting, so that in
all your penitential dress you may fully conform to that which you
inherited from Eve. I mean the shame of the first sin, and the
abomination of man's destruction which is connected with his. "In
pain and sorrow you are bearing your child, woman, yet you feel your
husband's desire and he holds you in his power". And do you not
know that you are such an Eve? God's rule is for your sex in this
age: you must necessarily live in guilt. You are the devil's gate.
You are the opener of the forbidden tree. You are the first apostate
from the divine law. You are he who consented to the devil and did
not fight valiantly enough. Thou didst so easily destroy the image of
God, the man. For your punishment, which is death, even the Son of
God had to die. And do you think to adorn yourself with a
tunic?"
Bishop Gregorius Nazianzus, one of the
Cappadocian fathers, was born around 329 AD and died on 25 January
389 AD. He was a friend of Bishop Basil the Great and his brother
Gregory of Nyssa. Gregorius Nazianzus pondered his career choice
between being a lawyer, a professor of rhetoric, a monk and an
ascetic until he received guidance on his career choice from Basil
the Great. Gregory then served in a variety of ecclesiastical
positions. After many difficult events104 he retired for a time to
the monastery of Seleucus at the end of 375. After Basil's death (1
January 379 AD), Gregory was called to become bishop of
Constantinople, where he arrived in 379 AD. Gregory gave a speech to
commemorate the death of Basil. In that eulogy, he interpreted the
words of the Sermon on the Mount about hunger and thirst as fully
spiritual metaphors.
Gregory's speeches were admired. He also
experienced severe opposition, to which he reacted with depression.
At a time of opposition and depression, Maximus (or Maximus I, or
'Maximus the Cynic') arrived in Constantinople from Alexandria, with
his long hair, white cloak and beggar's helmet. Maximus introduced
himself as a convert to Christianity. Gregory received Maximus with
hospitality and complete confidence. However, Maksimus soon turned
against Gregorius. He was ordained bishop while Gregory was confined
to his sickbed.
The bishop's ordination was performed by
friends of Maksimus who had arrived from Alexandria. However, Maximus
was driven out of Constantinople by Gregory's friends. Emperor
Theodosius (who had been baptised in Thessalonica in 380 AD) accepted
only Gregory as bishop. Maximus had to return to Alexandria. Gregory
described Maximus not as praising the 'cynical bishop's' brilliant
morals, but as reproaching him for not having a regular job and for
slinking through the streets like a shameless, dirty dog (kuwn,
kuniskoV, amfodwn uphrethV). In Constantinople in 380 AD, he gave a
speech on the arrival of the Egyptians in which Gregory rebuked
Maximus' malicious eloquence. He compared it to the abundant Nile. He
also directed his harsh words at Peter, the bishop of Alexandria, who
had sent his own men to consecrate Maximus as bishop of
Constantinople.
Gregory's model of faith was far from
cynicism, which he saw not as modesty, humble asceticism, but as a
self-satisfied pursuit of glory. Gregory's interpretation of poverty
and wealth was linked to Christology and soteriology, not cynically
to human self-sufficiency113 and renunciation of family ties. Both
poverty and wealth could serve a mission.
Tinder
society
In the old system, known as the "denial
society", people's dissatisfaction was still considered a
perfectly "human" condition. Disappointment and sadness
were part of the old way of life, you couldn't always stand up to
show your praise and self-satisfaction. Cynics were troublemakers,
Christians had been different.
Before and after the turn of
the millennium in the 'West', starting with the United States of
America, a 'pleasure society' emerged, where it was possible to think
of pleasure as the norm, dissatisfaction identified with a disease
that would eventually break a man. We are approaching the rebirth of
the self-satisfied demonstration of the freedom of pagan
cynicism.
Dissatisfaction even became a matter of state
security, because it could break up society, dissatisfaction is a
hybrid threat. Dissatisfaction, which is quite typical in human and
historical terms, is therefore no longer tolerated either at
individual level, as if it were a 'psychological problem', or at
state level, as a 'hybrid threat'. Dennis Prager, in Happiness Is a
Serious Problem (1999), argued that our duty to the social order
should have been to enjoy and be happy. Dennis Mark Prager's book was
published in 1998, and its obligation to happiness could not have
been imagined even in the United States of America ten years
earlier.
Todd McDowen, in The End of Dissatisfaction: Jacques
Lacan and the Emerging Society of Enjoyment (Psychoanalysis and
Culture), writes in his observation of the American situation at the
turn of the millennium that even then the old "entrance fee"
to the social order, emphasized by Lévi-Strauss, had undergone a
transformation: the social order no longer explicitly demanded the
sacrifice of enjoyment, but instead demanded enjoyment itself as a
kind of social duty.
The West is contaminated by its demands
for happiness, satisfaction and pleasure. Todd McGowan is Associate
Professor of English at the University of Vermont. In his book The
End of Dissatisfaction, Dr. McGowan combines Lacanian theory with
cultural criticism to offer an analysis of the impact of global
capitalism on early 21st century American issues. Inspired by Sigmund
Freud, Jacques Lacan and Slavoj Žižek, he leads us to reflect on
the malaise and endemicity of Western society in the early 21st
century, when the "West" was already bent on globalization.
Ill-temperedness for all!
According to Dr McGowan's
observations, the new era of the early 21st century would have
radically shifted from prohibitions to commanded pleasures, to
contaminated performances of pleasures. In traditional societies,
life had been organised primarily around fundamental prohibitions
(i.e. restrictions on pleasure). In the consumer society, the 'West'
of the 21st century was made to feel that our main duty was to enjoy
ourselves. If one does not enjoy oneself, then one can no longer
endure.
The psychoanalytical irony is that the 'command to
enjoy' actually makes it even more difficult to enjoy. This not only
has consequences on a personal level, but it affects the whole of
politics, economics and culture.
McGowan argues from the
"West" of the early 21st century that if and when there is
nothing but "compulsion to enjoy ourselves", society has no
other recourse than this and will aggressively protect the promised
pleasure against those "others" who seem to "threaten"
it.
The aggressive commitment of the 21st century "West"
to protect the promised pleasure gave rise to a very endemic malaise.
Societies were contaminated by an unquenchable yearning.
According
to McGowan, the defining feature of American 'modern society' - the
early years of the 21st century - was the valuation of pleasure.
Michael Wolf calls it an 'entertainment economy' in which, as Neil
Postman puts it, people were in danger of 'amusing ourselves to
death'. This explosion of pleasure seemed to mark a major change from
the situation only a few decades earlier - as if people had entered a
new era of social relationships. This change raised the question of
its degree of radicality: is the 'increase in pleasure' indicative of
a fundamental change in the social order as such, or is it just part
of the normal development of capitalist society?
The
proliferation of appeals (and commands) to pleasure and the public
display of alleged pleasures represented a radical change in the
social order. It marked a change in the logic of social organisation.
Greed, which threatened to destroy ancient societies, became the
lifeblood of modern society. The beginning of capitalism had been an
epochal change, a transition from a static society to a progressive
society. The end of the modern world and of 'traditional' society is
now the abandonment of the old society, which had been based on the
denial of pleasure, and in its place has come a society that commands
pleasure or jouissance - it must at least be presented in order to be
valid.
There is a saying in the Bible that is
thought to speak of our own time: "Loving pleasures more than
God" (2 Timothy 3:4) The text says that the people of the last
days "love pleasures" (φιλήδονοι). In the Bible,
this is expressed as a combination of two words, the latter being a
very familiar word: ἡδονή (hēdonē). As such, 'hedone' means
'pleasure', but it had become an important 'concept' beyond itself in
ancient Greek philosophy. This is where the polysyllabic word
'hedonism' comes from. According to James 4 of the New Testament, the
friend of the world is the enemy of God. People begin to live "in
the power of their desires, in the power of passion and
jealousy".
Jacques Lacan dealt extensively with these
"desires" which man cannot control. However, according to
him, these desires, which seem genuine, are never really our own, but
are created through fantasies that are bound up with culture and
ideologies. It is through fantasy that we learn - and are mistaken -
about how to desire.
Even before the Greek thinkers, in the
original old Babylonian version of the Gilgamesh epic, Siduri gave
the following hedonistic defence: 'Fill your belly. Satisfy your
belly, day and night. Let the days be full of joy. Dance and make
music day and night... These things alone are a man's concern."
The debate about desire and pleasure is well over 2000 years
old. The debate is coming to an end in its last days: desire has
become a taboo, from which emerges a nullifying commandment: man's
pride alone. According to McGowan, in the past society had required
subjects to give up private pleasure in the name of social duty, but
in the 'West' of the early 21st century the only duty was already to
enjoy oneself as much as possible. It is no longer even examined
whether these 'desires', possibly felt by the majority or the
minority, are the result of an error.
Particularly in the
early 2000s, in American society it became a fundamental social duty
to commit oneself to pleasure. Advertisements, friends, movies,
parents, television shows, Internet sites, and even authority figures
are now quite typically urging everyone to maximize their pleasure,
each at their own discretion. And let no one tell me that I am not
allowed to claim my pleasure as right and good!
This is a
dramatic change from the old way in which the social order was
constructed: instead of being bound together by shared sacrifice,
subjects now began to coexist in their isolated enclaves of pleasure,
their managed pleasures surrounded by the managed pleasures of
others. Criticism of this enclave, even if it was done by innuendo,
can be seen as a crime worthy of genocide. Such hypersensitivity in
the debate on pleasure and desire did not exist in antiquity, where
the subject was a central theme of discourse and teaching. So it has
been throughout the millennia of Western cultural history. Now the
debate has been shut down by a mighty hand.
Jacques Lacan has shed light on the
change from a society of denial to a society of pleasure. The old
society of prohibition required all its members to sacrifice their
individual, private pleasure for the good of the social order as a
whole, if necessary. Man received an 'identity' from society in
exchange for the enjoyment he had to give up. This was traditionally
the way in which society itself functioned. The team requires
individual sacrifice to ensure the team's success. In order for the
team to win, the individual must give up his dreams for full
individual achievement and fit his abilities into the team structure.
In the "West" of the early 2000s, in a society of
"commanded" pleasure, it was discovered that the dynamics
now changed dramatically. Instead of requiring its members to forgo
individual pleasure in favour of the whole, the pleasure society
commanded pleasure - individual pleasure became paramount. Sports
stars came to the fore, more concerned with personal statistics and
money than with the success of their team. Those sports stars were
not aberrant narcissists. In the pleasure society of the early 2000s,
private, publicly performed pleasure, which threatened the stability
of the old society of prohibition, became a force for stability and
even acquired the status of a duty.
Cuba Gooding's mantra in
Jerry Maguire - "Show me the money!" - has become the
automatic and often false explanation for all kinds of behaviour in
why Alex Rodriguez decided to play baseball for the Texas Rangers.
Why did Monica Lewinsky appear in an interview with Barbara Walters
to tell her story? In reality, subjects have the capacity to act
against their own interests. McGowan brings up Seminar V, where
Jacques Lacan points out that Freud discovered the
self-destructiveness of desire: "The analytic study of desire is
based on masochism". Thinkers who preceded Freud (Hobbes,
Machiavelli, etc.) already did so - but it was up to psychoanalysis
to explain why they were able to act against their self-interest, to
overcome their narcissism. Freud argues that because of this human
ability to act against his own self-interest, "the normal man is
not only much more immoral than he believes, but also much more moral
than he knows."
Sigmund Freud formulated the concept of
the death wish in his work Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920). He
did so to explain the fact that we often act with complete disregard
for our own self-interest, acting instead out of a compulsion we do
not understand. The concept of the death wish means that we sacrifice
everything and anything (even life itself) for the sake of 'our own
Cause'. Often this "Cause" is a national "Cause"
that constitutes a "national identity". According to Slavoj
Zizek, at the beginning of the First World War, the European working
class was still well aware of the Communist International and seemed
to know that war would not serve their interests, war was an
imperialist struggle. And yet, when the moment of decision came, the
European working class almost unanimously supported the war, even to
Lenin's great surprise. The working class shared the nationalist
jouissance. They were driven not by their own self-interest - the war
was not about self-interest - but by their relationship to
'pleasure', which was by no means real but fantasy-based.
In
the early 2000s, conservative critics denounced the Western "pleasure
society" and called for a return to "family values", a
world where prohibition kept us safe from pleasure outbursts. But
this desire to return to the past was rarely genuine. The
proclamations were not a real desire to return to the past, but more
precisely, they wanted the best of both worlds - the 'benefits' of
modernity (computers, cars, TVs) without the effects (isolation,
pleasure, narcissism) - without understanding the interdependence of
benefits and effects. Worst of all was the failure to understand that
pleasure is not at all implicit in, for example, the content of the
Internet (i.e. the objectionable pornography etc.), but in the form
in which we are hooked to the computer, isolated from the rest of the
world. What matters is not what people experience in the modern
world, but that they experience it in a modern way.
McGowan argues that a return to the
past, to traditional values, is inevitably mediated by the present.
As a result, a common 'rejectionist' alternative at the turn of the
millennium was the 'cynical embrace of the pleasure society', where
the cynic knows well enough the problems of the status quo, but acts
as if he does not and lives his daily life secure in the knowledge
that the social order cannot be changed despite its problems. This
attitude also resigns the subject to the private world: for the
cynic, change would only be possible on a personal level (i.e. I can
change my weight, my level of happiness, my lover, etc.), so that is
what I should focus on. The cynic about the pleasure society may
still retain the 'language of revolution' in his speech, but today
the revolution tends to turn away from the complexity of overall
social change and promotes 'turning inwards'.
At the turn of
the millennium, we could see and experience that limiting oneself and
one's activities to the private sphere was precisely what continued
to feed the domination of the pleasure society, which made
large-scale change seem impossible. The new world became
'inevitable'. It was typical to refuse to acknowledge one's
participation in a pleasure society that presented its spectacles of
pleasure as its new god. But nostalgia and cynicism were - sadly -
effectively no alternative to the pleasure society.
The
decadent system of the West always fails to deliver on its
promises
The basic fact that the pleasure society
should be able to recognise is that it is the pursuit of pleasure
that has failed: the pleasure society cannot deliver the pleasure it
promises. The smile of the flag-waving mayor is feigned. The West's
idea of the necessity of pleasure - the elevation of pleasure to a
social duty - deprived pleasure of its marginal position in relation
to the social order.
In fact, the problem with pleasure is
that we enjoy the obstacle itself. Children's enjoyment of Christmas
morning is due to the obstacle of enjoyment, represented by the
wrapping paper on the presents and the prohibition on opening
presents before Christmas Day. Without wrapping paper - with direct
access to presents - Christmas would be just another day. Indeed, the
pleasure of a precious object is the pain and risk, the high price
and the horror of its acquisition. When we experience pleasure
directly, when we have gifts without wrapping paper and on any (or
every) day of the year, the pleasure (and the gift) loses its value,
the value of inaccessibility.
If we experienced pleasure
directly, it would lose all value and become mundane, and as a result
we would not actually experience pleasure. Thus, the problem with the
pleasure society is not that we get too much pleasure, but that we do
not have enough. Instead of finding new ways to curb pleasure, we
need to find new ways to make ever-dwindling pleasure possible again
and again.
According to McGowan, the symptoms of the pleasure
crisis in the Western social order at the turn of the millennium were
the 'decline of the traditional father', the loss of transcendence
and detachment, the loss of meaning, the development of widespread
cynicism, the rise of political apathy and the fading of desire, the
disappearance of the public sphere, and the rise of rudeness and
aggression.
The role of prohibition in structuring society is
reflected in Claude Lévi-Strauss's discussion of incest, in Freud's
speculations on the origins of society and in Lacan's conception of
the symbolic order. Each of these three schools of thought has
stressed that prohibition is the sine qua non of a coherent social
order.
McGowan raises a worrying point when assessing the
attempts to change the security systems in Scandinavia, especially in
the very recent past. Social order and other 'systems' alike always
seem to promise, from the outset, 'a substitute pleasure of their
own', but in the end one should know that no system can break its
promise. Why indeed should one give the feeling of 'victorious' power
and even more powerful weapons to those who are in a state of
disarray, in pain from their home-made self-esteem problems, but
seeking their new pleasurable 'freedom'? However, the survival of
both the social order and security systems depends above all on
'saving resources, calculating possibilities and preparing for the
future'.
According to the Bible, the knowledge of God is also
linked to fear: "The fear of the Lord is the beginning of
wisdom" (Proverbs 9:10). What is the consequence of rejecting
fear, and with it limitations, but instead falling into a delusion of
grandeur? Sigmund Freud answers this with his description of the
prototypical experience of pleasure, which reveals how pleasure
produces a subject who does not care about society and productivity.
He is 'like a baby who has sunk from breast-feeding, satiated, on his
back and fallen asleep with flushed cheeks and a beatific smile on
his face'.
Of course, every social order must also use
pleasure to maintain itself, nowadays this is understood as a special
need for the pleasure of leaders. In fact, Jacques Lacan goes so far
as to say that the fundamental signifier of the social order "is
not born of the universe, but is born of pleasure." Thus,
despite the ban on pleasure - if this ban on pleasure has not been
taken away, especially from the power elite - deservedly pleasure
continues to have a positive effect on society.
Religions
promise unbridled pleasure - an afterlife - in return for the
sacrifice of pleasure in the here and now. Even societies can
continue to exist if their subjects receive sufficient and just
enjoyment from their sacrifices; the sacrifice of enjoyment itself
produces enjoyment. So many people are still iconoclastic in the
bread queue at Myllypuro when the Prime Minister is the subject of a
beautiful picture on the cover of an American women's magazine. I
have seen these admiring faces: our own Prime Minister (forgetting
completely that this very person did not give money to shorten the
bread line, but for weapons for the proxy war of the West in Ukraine
and a fence on the Russian border)!
Of course, every social order must also
use pleasure to maintain itself, nowadays this is understood as a
special need for the pleasure of leaders. In fact, Jacques Lacan goes
so far as to say that the fundamental signifier of the social order
"is not born of the universe, but is born of pleasure."
Thus, despite the ban on pleasure - if this ban on pleasure has not
been taken away, especially from the power elite - deservedly
pleasure continues to have a positive effect on society.
Religions
promise unbridled pleasure - an afterlife - in return for the
sacrifice of pleasure in the here and now. Even societies can
continue to exist if their subjects receive sufficient and just
enjoyment from their sacrifices; the sacrifice of enjoyment itself
produces enjoyment. So many people are iconoclastic in the bread
queue in Myllypuro when the Prime Minister is the subject of a
beautiful picture on the cover of an American women's magazine. I
have seen these admiring faces: our very own Prime Minister! He is a
democrat, risen from the poor to take up our cause!
Although
the old prohibition society relied on the imaginary to compensate for
the discontent it created in its citizens, it still sought to control
both real and imaginary pleasure. This is one of the crucial
differences between a society of prohibition and a society of ordered
pleasure - with dangerous eschatological consequences.
A forced pleasure society actively
promotes imaginary pleasure - to the point of anger; a prohibition
society, on the other hand, restrains pleasure. The function of the
symbolic order was to balance pleasure. According to McGowan, we can
see the dilemma of pleasure, especially in the case of the
obsessive-compulsive (OCD) person: he continues to talk and do things
in order to maintain the pleasure he fears will "run out"
when the talking and doing stops. The obsessive-compulsive person
cleans up so as not to leave a gap for a sudden burst of pleasure,
because it is frightening.
The symbol allows the object to
endure time; it stops the temporality of the object by trapping the
object in a symbolic web. It gives the object an identity, which is
the key to its permanence. The obsessive no longer speaks in the same
way; he produces speech only to prevent the gap from being
encountered.
The old symbolic order was based on a
prohibition, which made possible a contract of reciprocity. In
contrast, when the symbolic order breaks down and the old society of
prohibition becomes a society of pleasure, a claustrophobic feeling
arises: the desire for more elbow room and power is the result of
insufficient symbolic experience.
Lacan argues in Seminar II
that the symbolic system creates at least a small possibility of a
secret, something hidden. In Seminar V, Lacan uses the example of
Robinson Crusoe's encounter with Friday to clarify this dimension,
when he explains that Robinson found Friday's footprint.
In
the symbolic system of the old society, man has sacrificed his
pleasures in return for a place to breathe - a kind of hiding place
for the subject. Both the transformation that began in the West at
the turn of the millennium to a society of enforced representations
of pleasure and the Great Reset idealised by the World Economic Forum
both take away the hiding place, the privacy, the respite even from
one's own intrusive operations.
Shame
In
Seminar I, Jacques Lacan gives the example of the symbolic "elephant"
and McGowan explains that this is how people think about the need for
a good name:
"For example, I would rather be the
immobile Christopher Reeve, when I have a respected name, than the
healthy O. J. Simpson, whose name has become infamous. The
destruction of Simpson's name has made his life far more unbearable
than Reeve's physical disability has made his life. Such appreciation
is due to the effect of the symbolic order on the change of
importance - the setting of the symbol as an indicator of
value."
The increasing and all-pervasive system of
surveillance and control robs people of the honour of their own good
name by destroying their privacy. McGowan highlights a character in
E. L. Doctorow's novel Loon Lake who says "wealth is accumulated
in order to give it away and thus bring honour to the giver".
The money is used to buy a place for the name to appear in public.
The great advantage of being rich is the accumulation of a
recognition that someone with less money cannot get. Being rich means
ipso facto that I and my importance are recognised by another.
Cars
have historically worked in exactly the same way. A fancy car implies
a certain status, that a person has gained a certain kind of
recognition in the social order. The things a person does to their
car - washing and waxing it, for example - suggest that the primary
meaning of the car is based on the recognition it provides rather
than on enjoyment. A luxury car is bought not just to enjoy the
luxury it offers, but to gain recognition that one can afford such
luxury. The importance of recognition for a person's mental health is
well known. It is no coincidence that the information agents serving
the military alliance have repeatedly and publicly highlighted how
the anti-military alliance and pro-Russian people are unemployed,
they don't even have a good car (at least not any more).
Owning
a luxury car in this civilisation has enabled a person to enjoy the
recognition that comes with ownership. The absence of this
recognition and enjoyment is deliberately recalled to strike a blow
at the consciousness of the haters.
The domination of recognition over the
enjoyment of recognition within the symbolic order is not only - or
even primarily - expressed in that way, however, in money and
consumer culture, but also in every decision to take up a public
position in society: to run for public office, to go to war or even
to become a TV celebrity - or to enter the "field" of
seminars and the media and in return to experience face control, to
be rejected from these conditions of entry into the field.
The
old society of prohibition was built on this sense of reciprocity and
reinforced it by a constant emphasis on recognition. Recognition was
also used as a blow to the other side. It involves operating on a
sensitive ground, placing stakes on what the other might think of me,
rather than cutting myself off from the other or trying to destroy
the other. I fantasize about how the Other sees me; I set the Other
as the ideal of my ego, the point from which I want to be seen. Every
pursuit of recognition tacitly recognizes the Other as well.
Max
Weber, in The Ethics of Protestantism and the Spirit of Capitalism,
notes that early capitalist ideology made it clear that 'it is not
leisure and pleasure but only action that serves to increase the
glory of God in accordance with the clear manifestations of his
will'. Liberal or competitive capitalism had demanded the
renunciation of pleasure in order to get the work required for the
functioning of the system done at all. The ideal of the work ethic
served as the dominant ideological means by which liberal capitalism
maintained renunciation.
Later, monopoly capitalism gave rise
to a consumer culture designed to produce the demand required by the
mode of production. Capitalist ideology itself began to become an
obstacle to the full development of the capitalist mode of production
in the era of monopoly capitalism. Eventually, pleasure was no longer
forbidden, it became commanded - and controlled if one did not
participate in the new commanded pleasure.
McGowan takes the
example of Theodore Dreiser's fictional work Sister Carrie, which
describes the emergence of compulsory pleasure in American society.
When George Hurstwood first appears in the novel, he is living a
successful but ordinary life in a capitalist society. He works as the
manager of a well-known Chicago bar. He lives a monotonous life with
his wife, whom he no longer loves, and longs for the pleasure that
Carrie Meeber seems to offer. When George he runs away with Carrie
and steals from his boss to finance their getaway, George also leaves
the safe world of forbidden pleasure and enters strange territory -
the world of pleasure. George now also leaves everything that made
his success possible. He ruins his good name and destroys the
reputation on which he had built his success. As the novel
progresses, George's condition slowly deteriorates - he loses Carrie,
his home and eventually everything - until he finally kills himself.
McGowan writes that George's destruction also points to the
emergence of a new world in which sacrificing pleasure for
recognition no longer pays. George's subsequent attempts to return to
the old world, however, reveal starkly that the old world no longer
exists.
Although the emergence of a consumer culture under
monopoly capitalism marked a shift to the commandment of pleasure, it
was only in the era of global capitalism that this new commandment
became established as an ideology. Slavoj Zizek argues that the
external framework of ethics remains, but the content changes: the
ideal of the self is 'externalised' as the expectations of the social
group to which the individual belongs. The source of moral
satisfaction is no longer a sense of loyalty to oneself, but a sense
of loyalty to the group. The citizen now looks at himself "through
the eyes of the group"; he seeks to earn its love and respect.
With the emergence of global capitalism, the shift towards
the imperative of enjoyment became more apparent. Under global
capitalism, pathological narcissism decisively broke away from the
common structure of the autonomous individual and the human being of
the organisation. According to Zizek, the arrival of the
'pathological narcissist' broke the very framework on which the
[egoideal] was based. The pathological narcissist no longer sees
'duty' as devotion to the ego ideal.
Instead of living in a
society that denies pleasure, we increasingly live in a society that
commands it. Those who are under the command of pleasure become total
global capitalist subjects. They are constantly looking for new
products offered by the global capitalist economy in the hope of
gaining more pleasure.
"Ordinary human misery" no
longer appropriate?
McDowen writes about American popular
psychology at the turn of the millennium, where the idea of pleasure
was even expressed in a direct and explicit way. Dennis Prager, in
Happiness Is a Serious Problem (1999), argued that our duty to the
social order is to enjoy and be happy.
Dennis Mark Prager, a
Jew, is an American radio host and talk show host who is also the
founder of the conservative PragerU media company. In 1969, Prager
studied in England and took a trip with a Jewish group to the Soviet
Union to interview Jews. He became the national spokesman for the
struggle of Soviet Jewish students. He later went on to head the
Brandeis-Bardin Institute. At that time, as a moral critic, he
attacked secularism and narcissism. He was called the Jewish Billy
Graham. At the time, Prager supported Jimmy Carter in the US
presidential election.
In 1986, after his divorce, Prager
spent a year in therapy and wrote a book on homosexuality, opposing
the normalisation of homosexuality in Judaism. In 1992 he remarried.
In 1996, Prager testified before Congress that the acceptance of
homosexuality as equivalent to heterosexual conjugal love was a decay
of Western civilisation. Prager supported Donald Trump in the 2016
presidential election. In April 2020, Prager called the COVID-19
closures "the greatest mistake in human history." As a
result, he came under heavy attack in the media.
In a November
2021 interview with Newsmax, Prager claimed that "irrational
fears" about people who have not been vaccinated against the
COVID-19 vaccine have wrongly made them "American outcasts the
likes of which I have never seen in my life." They have become
outcasts even more than gay men and intravenous drug users during the
AIDS crisis. The Independent called his comments "alarming
revisionism".
In an interview, Prager also called
concerns about climate change "idiotic" and "absurd".
On 18 October 2021, Prager announced that his COVID-19 test had been
positive the previous week and that he had received ivermectin and
Regeneron monoclonal antibody treatment. He said that he had been
taking hydroxychloroquine and zinc prophylactically "from the
beginning" and that "natural immunity" from deliberate
infection with COVID-19 was what he had "hoped for all along".
Dennis Prager, who was already involved
in many of them and later still is, wrote in a book in 1999:
"We
tend to think that we owe it to ourselves to be as happy as we can
be. And this is true. But happiness is much more than a personal
matter. It is also a moral obligation." "So we owe it to
our husband or wife, to our colleagues, to our children, to our
friends, indeed to everyone who comes into our lives, to be as happy
as we can be."
Conservative as he was in his public
reputation, Prager's conception of the duty to be happy in fact
radically altered a conception of duty that had historically been
associated with limiting one's happiness rather than maximising one's
happiness.
Prager was not alone, but part of a broad trend in
American ego psychology towards 'positive psychology' (most
prominently advocated by Martin Seligman, Professor of Psychology at
the University of Pennsylvania). Positive psychology considers
pleasure rather than dissatisfaction as the normal human condition.
Freud was writing in the midst of a society of denial and considered
that keeping "ordinary human misery" was the best that man
could hope for. In contrast, positive psychologists see misery as
nothing more than an aberration.
In 1992, George Bush wanted
to revive the US economy - and his election bid. He told Americans
that it was their 'patriotic duty' to go shopping (i.e. to enjoy
themselves, even if it meant getting a new credit card). The new
understanding of patriotism and duty showed a profound change in the
social order of the time. The beginning of Bush's second presidency
saw a similar compulsion to spend money for the good of the
country.
Immediately after the September 11 attack on the
World Trade Center, when Bush publicly called on US citizens to "show
their patriotism". He urged them to 'get on board' and 'go to
Disney World'. To resist the terrorists' attempt to derail the US
economy, Bush reasoned, Americans had to make themselves spend.
A
front-page story in USA Today on 3 October 2001 was headlined
"Shoppers are now spending for their country". Under the
President's leadership, these exhortations, urging us to indulge in
the name of patriotic duty, represented something radically new.
Symbolic authority explicitly urged people to enjoy themselves and
warned against restraint. We can be sure, according to McGowen, that
a new world had been entered. As late as the early 1960s, presidents
were still demanding the sacrifice of pleasure - "Ask not what
your country ..." In the 1990s and 2000s, they were already
demanding pleasure itself.
The command to enjoy creates the
feeling that the subjects lost all restraint, that the social order
had gone haywire. Dan Quayle attacked the television series Murphy
Brown, complaining that Murphy Brown's decision to become a single
parent was a bad example for American children. In Quayle's view, it
was a bad example in that it showed a prominent figure in society who
chose to enjoy himself rather than abide by restrictions.
The
horror at the idea of unbridled pleasure was even more evident in the
1987 anti-American cultural work The Closing of the American Mind by
the American philosopher and academic Allan Bloom, who stated quite
bluntly that he was horrified by the rise of sexuality in the new
culture. He is horrified by rock music: "Rock music appeals to
only one thing, a barbaric appeal, to sexual desire - not love, but
sexual desire that is undeveloped and uneducated." If we give in
to the culture that rock music represents, and we become a society
centred on pleasure rather than denial, we will, according to Bloom,
lose civilisation itself and return to barbarism. Bloom wrote The
Closing of the American Mind, in which he called for turning away
from the dangers (and temptations) of pleasure and rediscovering the
benefits that come with accepting denial.
How genuinely did
Bloom respond to the denial of a turn to pleasure? Alan Bloom had a
successful university career at Cornell University, the University of
Toronto, Tel Aviv University, Yale University, the École normale
supérieure in Paris and the University of Chicago. A Jewish boy,
Alan Bloom completed his doctorate at the University of Chicago on
Isocrates, an ancient Greek oratory teacher who earned a substantial
income from his written speeches. Bloom complained that a vacuum had
been created in the souls of Americans into which demagogic radicals
such as the student leaders of the 1960s could jump. The brown shirts
of the Nazis filled the void created in the Weimar Republic in a
similar way.
Bloom criticised the fact that relativism as a
philosophical feature of modern liberalism had undermined the
Platonist-Socratic doctrine. The contradictory or double-moralistic
Jewish man's rebuke to modern liberal relativism was his own life,
for Bloom was gay. His last book, Love and Friendship, was dedicated
to his partner Michael Z. Wu. It is generally accepted that Bloom
died of AIDS. How could Bloom, who was accused of being a reactionary
and presented himself as such, be truthfully judged? Rather, McDowen
would define Bloom as 'seeking solutions from a nostalgic past'.
In fact, pleasure is as elusive after
the ideo-historical metamorphosis as before, but the superego's
command "Enjoy!" produces only a sense of duty to enjoy and
to present a new good state, but it does not produce pleasure. And
insofar as the command generates this sense of obligation, the
imperative of enjoyment makes enjoyment much more difficult. Just as
saying to oneself "I must go to sleep at once" is the
surest way not to sleep.
The problem of the pleasure
imperative is already anticipated in Immanuel Kant's moral
philosophy. Kant rejected the idea that a moral law could command our
happiness precisely because such a command would be impossible to
obey. According to Kant, we can obey - or at least imagine the
possibility of obeying - when the law requires the renunciation of
all pleasure; the object of the moral law is clearly identified in
this context.
In his treatment of the moral imperative in The
Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals, Kant stresses that the
indefiniteness of happiness makes it an impossible object as an
imperative: 'The problem of determining with certainty and
universality what act would promote the happiness of a rational being
is absolutely unsolved, so that there can be no imperative with
regard to it which, in a strict sense, would command him to do what
would make him happy. "
According to Kant, the more we
try to calculate our pleasure and nail it down, the more it escapes
us. As a result, we cannot create any path to follow the pleasure
command. If the law commands us to enjoy, we cannot obey it.
Kant's
morality does not in itself exclude the possibility of pleasure, but
it shows that pleasure cannot be legislated: Kant shows that subjects
can only derive pleasure or happiness indirectly. In our pursuit of
morality, we can, according to Kant, derive pleasure as a "side
benefit" of our moral action, an indirect route through which we
can reach pleasure. The nature of pleasure requires that we approach
it in this way - by striving elsewhere. McDowen points out that this
is precisely the detour of commanded pleasure that society does not
allow people to take.
The pleasure command sets out a direct
route to pleasure and thus paradoxically makes it unattainable. The
"pleasure society" is not characterized by an explosion of
unbridled pleasure, but, as a paradoxical consequence, by a lack of
pleasure, manifested in the apathy, aggression, cynicism and other
symptoms commonly experienced by people in the pleasure society.
Unlike the society of prohibition, the pleasure society thrives on
imaginary pleasure.
The symbolic father figure has all but
disappeared from the contemporary cultural landscape. The absence of
the traditional father is a symptom of the emergence of the pleasure
society. According to McDowen, the emergence of the pleasure society
coincides with the decline of the overt presence of the father and
symbolic authority. In a society of pleasure, there is no room for
the traditional symbolic father because his presence inhibits
pleasure and commands subjects to accept dissatisfaction.
Paul
Verhaeghe says: "We live in a time when the symbolic father as
such is being murdered, as is faith in him. "Lacan stated in
Seminar III: "The relationship between signified and signifier
seems always blurred, always ready to unravel. ' However, the more we
emphasise tolerance, the more the structural position of the symbolic
father disappears as a viable social identity for real fathers.
McDowen argues that real fathers 'neglect' their paternal role, not
so much because they are irresponsible individuals, but because the
role itself has ceased to be socially viable.
Of course,
conservative cultural critics have long argued that paternal
authority has been eroded. In Fatherless America, Confronting Our
Most Urgent Social Problem (1996), David Blankenhorn extensively
discussed the conservatives' views on behalf of the traditional
father. He argued that fatherlessness was typical of the American
landscape of the time, and lamented what fatherhood had become:
"The
United States is increasingly becoming a fatherless society. A
generation ago, an American child could reasonably expect to grow up
with his father. Today, the American child can reasonably expect not
to have one. Fatherlessness is approaching roughly the same level as
fatherhood as a defining characteristic of American
childhood."
According to Blankenhorn, the increasing
absence of fathers from the home marked a fundamental change in the
social organization of American society: whereas traditionally the
father had been present to discipline in the home, there was now no
longer any source of discipline or restraint. According to
Blankenhorn, without a father to deny pleasure, there was nothing to
prevent boys from turning to violence and girls from turning to sex,
American society became increasingly bloody and promiscuous.
Blankenhorn writes his grim conclusion: 'One primary consequence of
the increase in fatherlessness is that boys have more guns. Another
is that girls have more babies. "
Father absence not only
disrupts the family structure, it also triggers all our most serious
social problems. This mantra became a standard slogan among American
conservatives in the 80s and 90s. At the turn of the millennium,
left-wing cultural critics also turned their attention to paternal
absence and its supposed harmful effects. In Stiffed: The Betrayal of
the American Man, Susan Faludi, a self-proclaimed feminist (and
author of the feminist manifesto Backlash: The Undeclared War against
American Women), detailed the negative consequences of paternal
absence. Faludi argued that, in her view, in an age of "decorative
culture", the father no longer matters at all. The dominance of
images of pleasure and enjoyment leaves no place for the father to
transmit knowledge (of how things work) and values (the value of
loyalty and hard work). The father's knowledge and values should have
no place in today's world.
Faludi wants to reject fatherhood
on principle: "In the age of publicity, the father has no
knowledge or authority to transmit to the son." In the new
society, where the pleasure command already prevails, "the
father has no role to play. With nothing to control and therefore
nothing to pass on, he becomes at best a glorified babysitter. "
All the knowledge that the father once embodied and
transmitted to the son had become useless. According to Faludi,
success today does not require knowledge, at least not any knowledge
passed on by the father. Success is based on publicity, not on
knowledge. The father figure was once a champion who seemed to have
all the answers, but now this figure is redundant.
Joan K. Copjec, a Czech-born
philosopher and feminist from the US, is Professor of Modern Culture
and Media at Brown University. According to Joan Copjec, "the
old modern order of desire, dominated by the oedipal father, has
begun to be replaced by a new order" In this new order, a new
father has emerged - a father whom Slavoj Zizek calls "the anal
father of pleasure". Instead of denying pleasure, this new
father commands it. The new father is the anal father, because he
obsessively observes every detail of our lives and pricks into every
private cave where we might hide pleasure. His analness consists in
the fact that he watches everything.
The birth of the anal
father is a feature of the incipient pleasure society. He is the
authority figure for this society, just as the traditional father is
the authority figure in a society of prohibition. However, the
authority of the anal father is much more difficult to identify than
the authority of the traditional father.
The traditional
father places himself squarely in a position of authority, whereas
the anal father implies that he is - and believes himself to be -
just another citizen. He is no longer an ideal who looks down on the
citizen from above (from a position of authority), but an ideal who
exists alongside the citizen. Unlike yesterday's remote manager, who
gave orders but always stayed out of sight of his employees, the anal
father figure emerges as today's CEO, who has an open-door policy and
who always asks his employees for their opinions instead of just
giving orders. This gives the impression of a kind of democratisation
of authority: symbolic authority no longer remains distant and
detached from the subjects' activities, but now enters into these
activities itself.
The problem is that, by becoming less
distant, the anal master becomes the citizen's rival. The more the
symbolic authority - the figure of the anal father - assumes the
status of just another citizen among citizens, the more difficult it
becomes to identify this authority. By remaining aloof and insisting
on the renunciation of pleasure, the traditional father distanced
himself from the people he commanded.
McGowan accepts the
common claim about Western society that we are increasingly living in
a 'society dominated by images'. The dominance of the image is an
integral part of the pleasure society, providing a conduit to the
imaginary pleasure that characterises society. The image allows
citizens to imagine that they are obeying the pleasure commandment,
even if the pleasure derived from the image is only imaginary. The
emphasis on the imaginary is symptomatic of the Tinder society
because it provides the illusion of total pleasure and freedom
without the kind of pleasure that might interfere with the
functioning of the social structure itself.
Mitchell
Stephens, professor of journalism at New York University, in his book
The Rise of the Image, the Fall of the Word (1998), says that "the
image is replacing the word as the dominant means of intellectual
transportation". The French literary scholar and semiotician
Roland Barthes, Professor of Literary Semiology at the Collège de
France, who died in a car accident in 1980, described how 'the image
no longer represents the words; now the words are structurally
parasitic on the image'.
In psychoanalytic terms, the shift from
word to image would mean a shift of emphasis from the symbolic to the
imaginary. Emeritus Professor of Literature Juliet Flower MacCannell
has pointed out the shift from words to images in Regime of the
Brother (1991):
"What this most obviously means is that we
are now more influenced by images than by words, that we are
increasingly dealing with images than with words. As we prepare to
cross the street, we prefer to see a picture of a person walking
rather than a sign that says 'walk'. When we turn on a computer,
instead of typing the name of the program we want to start, we click
on the icon of the program."
The translation from
symbolic to imaginary order goes far beyond the mini revolution. The
image is now so dominant that it cannot be successfully narrativised
or incorporated into a symbolic form.
The French sociologist
and social theorist - a well-known media critic - Jean Baudrillard
has pointed out that because of its dominance, "the whole
traditional world of causality has been called into question: the
perspectival, deterministic space, the 'active', the critical space,
the analytical space - the distinction between cause and effect,
active and passive, subject and object, end and means".
Narrative
in words would necessarily rely on 'the traditional world of
causality', but imagistic narrative - if it can still be called
narrative at all - abandons it. The sociologist and popular culture
critic Neil Postman has analysed the historical turn towards the
image and its consequences in the popular press. Postman points out
that images have replaced words as a means of interaction. In Amusing
Ourselves to Death (1985), he argues that "Americans no longer
talk to each other, they entertain each other. They don't exchange
ideas, they exchange images. "
For Postman, it is not
only that images are greater than words in today's world, but also
that the dominance of images is causing an epistemological
revolution: we are beginning to believe on the basis of images we
identify with rather than on the basis of persuasive arguments. The
epistemological revolution that Postmann has identified can be
verified by anyone's reading of the events in Ukraine: news and
sanctions are drawn up on the basis of images because they are
sufficient to convince at least the general public and perhaps a
significant proportion of political leaders. Traditional research and
analysis of reports, on the other hand, are rejected even within
official organisations.
Neil Postman has followed the evolution
of advertising. Before 1900, advertisers relied primarily on
arguments to sell their products. For countless Americans, believing
has long been based on seeing, not reading. Today, truth is what can
be shown, not what can be claimed.
McGowan writes that "this
belief in the truth of the image makes us particularly vulnerable to
ideological coercion. The image, far more than the word, inspires
confidence, and it is this confidence that ideology hopes to inspire.
That is why fascists rely so heavily on images."
According
to Neil Postmann, the image represents the possibility of a
completely successful manipulation process. However, the great danger
of the epistemological shift - towards belief in the image - lies not
even in the possibility of manipulation, but in the inevitability of
distraction. The image stream of contemporary society keeps citizens
constantly entertained and distracted. We are amused, but we are also
isolated and obedient. Neil Postman dramatically articulates the
danger: "When the population becomes distracted by petty issues,
when cultural life is redefined as a constant round of entertainment,
when serious public discourse becomes baby talk, when, in short,
people become an audience and their public affairs a show for babies,
then the nation is in danger; cultural death is a distinct
possibility."
The illusion needs good pictures. For a
narcissist to take on the love of his own ego, a selfie is ultimately
more than a recommendation relayed on Tinder. Jacques Lacan stressed
that the ego itself is downright "imaginary", meaning that
the ego first develops as a bodily image, the way the subject sees
itself. The ego is formed as a result of the relationship with the
mirror: one sees one's own image in the mirror, this image provides
an illusion of wholeness (an illusion that masks the fragmentation
that would be the real body). The illusion makes the infant love the
image and take the image for the ego. The Prime Minister and many
other public figures are deeply unhappy with bad photographs, some
have even been taken to court over bad photographs. To maintain the
illusion there must be representative photographs because these
people live in the imaginary of their ego.
The ego, built
imaginatively through the image, is showered with love by the citizen
to give the illusion of integrity. The illusion of integrity masks
both the lack of the citizen and the lack of the great Other. Through
the illusion provided by the ego, the subject can visualize an image
of pleasure, an image that seems to overcome all lack. The citizen
avoids facing his true lack in the Other - in the objet petit a.
Lacan expressed this in Seminar X: "Through my image [. . .] my
presence in the Other is without residue. I cannot see what I am
losing there."
The ego deceives itself through the image
so that there is no residue, no objet petit a that could frighten it,
that this is such an outright waste that it cannot and dare not make
present in the Other, in the voice of conscience that might begin to
ring. Narcissistic pleasure is only imaginary, its function is to
exclude the possibility of real pleasure, to obscure the citizen's
relationship with the objet petit a, the lost object, the hidden
waste where the Prime Minister himself has taken his pleasures.
David Fincher's The Game (1997) begins with a description of
the narcissistic complacency of Nicholas Van Orton (Michael Douglas).
He is an obscenely rich business executive who lives in almost total
isolation. The film highlights the complacency of Nicholas' life and
his disconnection from other people. He lives in a lavish mansion
with all the trappings of wealth (expensive furnishings, a servant to
prepare his meals, a security fence at the entrance, etc.), but he
lives alone in the largely empty space of the mansion. But from the
moment Nicholas's brother Conrad (Sean Penn) introduces Nicholas to
"the game", he trades the imaginary satisfactions of this
narcissistic world for the unsatisfactoriness of desire. The events
of the film transform Nicholas from a narcissistic man living in a
state of imagined satisfaction to a desiring man constantly searching
for an answer he cannot find, when it turns out that Nicholas hasn't
really lost everything (that this was just part of the game).
The great attraction of narcissism's
appeal stems from its ability to avoid this desire for constant
dissatisfaction. In The Ecstasy of Communication, Jean Baudrillard
draws attention to the change of desire brought about by narcissism,
the shift from objet a to image:
"Images have become our
real sex object, the object of our desire. The obscenity of our
culture lies in the confusion between desire and its counterpart
materialised in the image."
The narcissistic turning of
desire towards the image (which is a turning away from desire itself)
allows a respite from the citizen's own lack and the lack of the
Other. In this way, the narcissist avoids recognizing the effects of
castration.
In the midst of a narcissistic sense of
isolation, the citizen of the pleasure society fails to see that lack
is constitutive of its existence as a citizen. By avoiding this
recognition, the citizen never has to acknowledge the unattainability
of total pleasure. Imaginary pleasure represents the failure of
pleasure, which is why the images that dominate the pleasure society
offer the possibility of a kind of pleasure that stabilizes rather
than threatens the social order.
When one chooses to "enjoy
Coca-Cola" - by adopting the image of the advertisement - one is
giving support to the system. The imaginary pleasure no longer
interferes, whereas real pleasure would fundamentally threaten and
could change the social order, this imaginary pleasure on offer
instead keeps things intact. Imaginary pleasure does not threaten the
structure of order. What is worse is the revelation of discontent.
It's bad when someone doesn't stand up to a standing ovation.
Communication ecstasy
In Seminar
I, Jacques Lacan called the imaginary sphere "the closed world
of the two". Closed in this way, without the absence or lack
that the symbolic order would bring, the imaginary offers a kind of
pleasure - the pleasure of the image - that the symbolic order cannot
offer.
Psychoanalysis has long pointed out that we seek a
transcendent state that we know only through its absence: we have no
access, we lack immediate access.
The necessity of travelling
and waiting - which we must do because we have no direct experience
of the object - produces the idea of the beyond: in the beyond
resides the object towards which one travels or for which one waits.
Without the idea of a transcendent beyond, all objects seem present
and accessible because they are on the surface, readily available.
Jean Baudrillard speaks of the "ecstasy of
communication". The Anti-Christ can indeed become ecstatically
communicative, accessible and present in the new immediacy that the
metaverse provides - if nothing before has so completely answered the
ecstatic trend of communication.
Jean Baudrillard says that
the absence or elimination of transcendence gives man a "total
presence" in a world in which both spatial and temporal distance
evaporate. As we move from a society that openly denies pleasure to
one that commands it, we begin to feel this suffocating effect, an
increasingly total presence. The Anti-Christ comes among
you.
Baudrillard is known as a theorist of simulation. He has
also identified the revolutionary effects of the universal
communication system. Simulation tends to eliminate all references.
Universal, immediate communication leaves you without distance and
without a sense of transcendence. Baudrillard's The Ecstasy of
Communication is his response to the evaporation of distance and
transcendence. Baudrillard focuses on what we lose when we lose value
through change.
In a world of instant accessibility, where
nothing is forbidden, all value is eroded. Objects derive their value
from their inaccessibility: the most valuable objects are always the
most inaccessible. If everything were already accessible, nothing
would retain any value either.
In April 2022, the Kiasma
Museum of Contemporary Art in Helsinki hosted Obscece, a work by the
Greek-Swiss choreographer and visual artist Alexandra Bachzetsis, in
which she and three other performers present a lustful gaze and the
manipulation of gender identity.
Baudrillard calls this
character of the contemporary world precisely obscene, but obscenity
is not only the result of sexual liberation, but specifically of the
destruction of the space of transcendence. This has also been seen in
Finland, where the exorcism of hellishly low powers in the spirit of
Jezebel has been trivialised as positive 'girl energy' and also as
expressions of sexual liberation in all possible letters, where the
sublime and the sacred can no longer be any kind of restriction when
they no longer exist. This has become obscene.
Obscenity is the result of total
exposure. Pride is the pride and audacity to bring obscenity to the
streets and parks, to churches and classrooms, in the form of drawing
activities for young children. For two days, the activist group Seta
will be invited to teach primary school children about sexuality in a
way that they themselves should be taught by healthy normal children:
children will know what it is to be male and female if they are
healthy. Such full exposure is a sine qua non of a promiscuous
society. To keep something hidden would be a violation of the new
"duties". A lewd society that plays, demands and proclaims
pleasure involves its subjects in an endless revelation of what the
society of prohibition kept secret. When the teacher presented this
programme to my little boy, my son had replied that what does the
Bible teach? The teacher replied that he couldn't say anything about
that...
On January 25, 2023, there was a conference in Russia
on education in the Orthodox Church: the global challenges of
modernity and the spiritual choice of man. In his opening address,
Patriarch Kirill spoke of "strengthening traditional moral
principles" as being "organically linked to the need to
support families". "It is against the family, against the
destruction of traditional family values, that the greatest blow of
the forces of evil is directed today. This is reflected primarily in
the content of films, some television programmes and especially in
content directed at Russia from other countries. I would like to note
with great pleasure that the preservation of the traditional family
institution is now receiving a great deal of attention from the
Russian state authorities. The President of our country, Vladimir
Vladimirovich Putin, has often spoken about this recently, and
legislators are touching on the protection of family values in their
work".
Patriarch Kirill also pointed out at the
conference on education in January that Russia had recently adopted
laws banning propaganda of non-traditional sexual relations in public
places and pedophilia. A completely opposite development has been
seen in Finland, where primary school pupils are obliged to attend
workshops on the terms of the proponents of these non-traditional
sexual relations. Kirill pointed out that Russia faced harsh
criticism for its restriction, even though the law adopted in Russia
does not even discriminate against anyone, does not restrict anyone's
freedom, but only limits the impact of non-traditional sexual
practices on children and young people. Russia was accused of
violating human rights, freedom and more. According to Kirill, it is
precisely this discussion with Western partners that is proof of what
is happening in the world in terms of the clash of different values,
different worldviews. According to Kirill, Russia is increasingly
becoming a real "island of freedom", "because we
defend values that offer real freedom".
In 1963, Theodor Adorno raised the
serious threat and consequence of the rejection of transcendence by
positivism and Martin Heidegger. According to Adorno, both
positivists and Heidegger opposed speculation because it referred to
transcendence. Metaphysics becomes suspect because it implies the
ability to distance oneself from one's situation or experience. It
imagines that distance is possible. The efforts of the logical
positivists and Heidegger to escape distance and transcendence are
not only foreshadowing the aspirations of contemporary philosophy,
but they also anticipate the current invited pleasure society that
claims and performs its happiness, which demands Pride parades in the
streets and parks - eventually even in children's classrooms in
schools. For early Heidegger, the individual death of Dasein was
still that which cannot be reduced to any other event; it is
essentially singular. As such, it brings with it precisely that sense
of distance, but it is precisely this that Heidegger later
lost.
Death is a necessary obstacle that cannot simply be
communicated or relativized. Death is a fundamental limit. Of course,
there is a proliferation of ploys that, with the disappearance of the
otherworldliness, death would not exist either. One does not want to
face death in its undeniable form, but as if death could be avoided.
In Being and Time, Martin Heidegger describes a long and inauthentic
attitude towards death. According to him, "typical discourse
speaks of death as a constantly occurring 'event'". Nowadays,
when someone dies, we often tend to look for an analogy of the
disease that led to death in, for example, the status of vaccination
or a coronavirus. By associating death with a particular status or
action, death is attempted to be deontologised; death is made to look
as if it could be successfully avoided. In this way, death is
rejected as the limit of necessity. Death no longer points to a
'moment of transcendence' which we must necessarily face anyway.
According to Baudrillard, "we are
dealing with an attempt to build a totally positive world, a perfect
world, liberated from death itself". In a society of enforced
pleasure, however, death in that way becomes increasingly terrifying
- and so do the measures to circumvent necessity. It is no
coincidence that, as we move towards the commandment of pleasure, the
efforts to eliminate the necessity of death also increase and become
more severe. Forced vaccinations and the monitoring of vaccination
status at the bar door fit into this new society - and pave the way
for an even worse dystopian enchantment, which is no longer the old
society of prohibition. Inoculation status queries also belong on the
dating boards of a contaminated Tinder society. They are part of the
entry requirements for Christmas carols at the doors of the
Evangelical Lutheran Church.
Running out of
ability to interpret and understand
Under the
weight of the imperative of pleasure and happiness, even 'important'
people, from journalists to pundits and heads of state, are losing
their ability to interpret what is happening in the world.
Interpretation would require distance and detachment, and a society
of imperious pleasure allows neither. They lack the ability to
reflect on the mediations that underlie this apparent immediacy. They
can no longer find access to a context that would allow them to
interpret being, interpretation fails because they lack the ability
to locate themselves in the world. To say that we are "in the
West" does not locate oneself in a world that is already in the
pit of hell, unless one has already entered the hellish chamber.
As
a result, "interpretation" only comes in disguised forms,
of which conspiracy theory is one well-known case. McGowan observed
that there was a discontent with universalism in the ideological
currents of his time, partly due to the left's turn away from Marxism
and towards what some call post-Marxism. No longer is the struggle of
the proletariat against the bourgeoisie heard, but other struggles -
for example, struggles against racism, sexism and homophobia - are
subordinated to it. The old epistemological niches have been erased
and replaced by a plurality of voices, each of which is simply
constructing its own discursive identity.
McGowan argues that
in a society that commands rather than denies pleasure, the pleasure
society produces paranoia: paranoia is born of the belief that this
other is enjoying for us. McGowan assesses the reaction to the
prevailing Western society as cynicism, an attempt to distance
oneself from power and resist the grip of power. The newer cynics
turn inward and show indifference to external authorities - or more
precisely to traditional prohibitions and inhibitions - with the aim
of self-sufficiency. In fact, since McGowan, it has been shown that
the newest cynics are astonishingly loyal to authority: embracing the
fears and dreams of the mainstream media, dutifully putting on masks,
taking spikes in the body, believing Putin's terrible plots against
Finland, but not accepting the Christian old prohibitions and
inhibitions.
By showing their indifference to public
law (like Diogenes and the cynics of today), they did not really
distance themselves from that law, but unwittingly revealed their
relationship to it. This kind of acting is done for the sake of
symbolic expression, for the sake of authority. A bit like today,
when the far left fights with right-wing politicians over who gets to
be first on the dystopian side. The cynic even stages his act in
public so that the symbolic authority can see it. Because it is
staged in this way, we know that the cynic's act - like Diogenes'
public masturbation - represents acting rather than an authentic act.
Acting is also worth thinking about in the staged debate of every
election debate.
Acting always takes place on stage, whereas
authentic action and authentic pleasure - a radical break from the
constraints of symbolic authority - take place off stage, without
reference. Hegel has described the encounter between Plato and
Diogenes:
In Plato's house [Diogenes] once walked on beautiful
carpets with his muddy feet and said: "I am stepping on Plato's
pride". "Yes, but the pride of another," Plato
replied, just as sharply. According to Hegel, Plato correctly
understood that the vanity of the cynic was to show himself and to
arrange a surprise. Of course, it can be said that Diogenes tried to
act in a way that would show his self-sufficiency, his distance from
all external authority, but his achievement was far from
self-sufficiency.
The new cynicism springs from the belief
that one can see through the workings of power, that one knows
perfectly well how the system works. The cynic even considers himself
- after carefully reading the tabloid headlines and watching a news
item on the subject on Yle - to be a fully enlightened subject -
because he thinks he has already 'seen it all'. So "cynicism is
enlightened false consciousness". Unfortunately, cynicism cannot
in reality provide relief from the claustrophobia of the contemporary
citizen: while it offers the illusion of distance from a symbolic
authority, it performatively maintains the citizen's sense of
proximity to that symbolic authority.
The democracy of our time is more
likely to die of indifference, even if social critics on the left
tend to focus on dangers such as intolerance. Apathy - the resistance
to political engagement - is increasingly infecting more and more of
society. McGowan joins the description by University of Rochester
history professor Christopher Lasch in his book The Revolt of the
Elites. According to Lasch, the turn away from politics is not only
in the areas we normally think of as political, but also in everyday
life. The ability to debate is disappearing in the midst of modern
apathy. The lack of interest in political issues makes people dull
and unenthusiastic interlocutors. All that remains are jaw-dropping
photos, 'shoptalk or personal gossip'.
People retreat further
and further into their private pleasure, hoping to secure their
pleasure from the intrusive Other. In the United States, this was
reflected in the apathetic new elite investing their money in
improving their own enclaves. Civic responsibilities no longer
extended beyond their own immediate environment.Retreat into privacy
and apathy are increasingly tempting: to be apolitical is to be free
from reminders that one is subject to deprivation; in other words,
that one is not enjoying fully. Slavoj Zizek explains that peace,
however, is not maintained "by moving towards the 'pathological
narcissist'", because for this person the Other (the desiring
subject) by its very existence appears as a violent intruder:
whatever he does (if he smokes, laughs too hard or not hard enough,
glances at me lustfully, or doesn't look at me at all) is a
disturbance of my precarious imaginative equilibrium. The new habit
of pleasure and distraction is a downright national trend towards a
politics that focuses not on changing the social order, but on
facilitating the enjoyment of imaginative pleasure.
According
to McGowan, we are witnessing a perversion of the old feminist slogan
'the personal is political'; today we have reached the point where
'the political is personal'. In other words, the only political issue
worth raising is one where my personal, private pleasure is at stake.
When my personal publicly presented narrative is at stake, this
becomes a security policy issue. The move towards political action on
any "personal" issue - is important because it illustrates
so clearly the political implications of the new commandment on
pleasure. The move to political action is only due to the troll
threat to imaginary pleasure.
Liquidating the
real friction
McGowan presents the disappearance of
the public world and being at home as a consequence of no longer
wanting to pay the price for access to that world. Not wanting to pay
the price we are asked to pay, we flee the public world and limit our
private lives. This denial of the public world inspired Robert
Putnam's bestseller Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of
American Community (2001). In his book, Putnam recounted the massive
withdrawal from public participation that had taken place in the
United States in the late 1990s. According to Putnam, this withdrawal
is even a fundamental threat to American society, because it
threatens to destroy the bonds that create social cohesion and enable
society to function.
Social engagement and participation had
been gradually declining since the late 1960s. People largely
withdrew from any activity involving entering public space. This is
not only true of NGOs and political parties, but even of bowling
leagues. Instead, they spend much more time isolated in their private
world, mostly watching TV, surfing the internet or playing video
games in their spare time. This orientation towards privacy generates
a widespread sense of disconnectedness, which is on the rise today.
McGowan goes on to argue that today we live largely in our
private worlds, from which we rarely leave to meet the public. There
are fewer and fewer reasons to leave the safety of home. I drink and
eat at home because I can stay there without being asked to sacrifice
my privacy. At home, I also run on the treadmill and cycle on my
exercise bike. At home, I can enjoy myself without interruption.
Going outside, participating in the public world, means breaking the
spell of the private home. According to McGowan, citizens have begun
to isolate themselves from their homes to avoid the intrusion of the
private. Today, I too did not step out of my home to see the last
glimpses of a world that is creaking at the joints. The end-of-life
celibacy becomes part of the grace of being unmarried with or without
it even more so.
The explosion of interest and traffic on the
internet is restoring a kind of public world in a new form, the
'virtual community'. Here, one "can participate" in a
public world where there is no real physical interaction. McGowan
agrees with the argument that the internet only increases the scope
of the citizen's private world and allows for a projection of the
self. The internet dramatically increases people's ability to hear
"echoes of their own voice". Instead of contributing to the
restoration of the public world, the Internet is constructing a new
imaginary escape from that world. In this refuge, the citizen can
avoid the great Other and interact with multiple alter egos - in an
imaginary space. These new technologies reduce the 'friction'
inherent in ordinary life. This 'friction', which the internet works
to remove and which lockdowns grew societies to abandon for a couple
of years, is, in Lacanian terms, the 'Friction of the Real'. It is no
longer willing to be confronted. This elimination of 'Real Friction'
is, of course, best suited to those who also have the power to shut
down the internet.
The Internet lacks the real dimension of
the Other, the part of the Other that would resist our own "ways
of symbolizing". In Read My Desire - Lacan Against the
Historicists (1994), Joan Copjec, Professor of Modern Culture and
Media at Brown University, points out that the retreat into privacy,
which had already begun at that time, "implies the destruction
of the civita itself, the destruction of ever larger parts of our
public state; we no longer try to protect an empty 'private' space,
but to dwell exclusively in that space". The problem is that the
destruction of the public world does not imply a real liberation from
privacy, but the private world itself begins to become public. I have
mischievously demonstrated and provoked this by posting daily on the
internet my running route and wish list for my dream date. This is
how the world works nowadays, as I have demonstrated. According to
Copjec, privacy ceases to be something that is supposed to be veiled
from prying eyes. When the public world disappears, people lose the
distance between public and private. Copjecin argues that when the
private becomes public and the public loses its autonomy, we begin to
suffocate.
In disaster films, the disaster creates a bond
between people, regardless of what in their private lives separates
them. The boundaries between rich and poor, white and black, young
and old, popular and unpopular seem to disappear in the face of
disaster. Hollowood does a better job than anyone of bringing that
narrative to life. Disaster - and the public world it brings to the
fore - can even reduce the significance of private disputes: former
enemies can interact on a neutral ground.
The modern citizen has become
uncivilised because he is plagued by his own lack of pleasure. If we
really enjoyed ourselves today, we would not develop aggression in
response to the enjoyment of others. Instead, we would be content
with our own pleasure and indifferent to the pleasure of the Prime
Minister, who has to present it in the public gallery under the cover
of a glass wall. It is to be feared that the glass walls will have to
be armoured glass, because hatred will increase. As hatred grows, in
flagrant violation of the eighth commandment, a picture of a
half-naked, slim woman's buttocks, known to be a lie, is circulated
on the Internet as if to hint that this could be Prime Minister Sanna
Marin after cheating on her spouse.
When I really enjoy
myself, I would not envy the pleasure of another, not even the
possible sex of Sanna Marin - if she can have any, but many
uneducated and aggressive citizens get angry, spread malicious
insinuations and accusations. Rudeness and aggression are symptoms of
our society, because so many citizens are quite fundamentally
incapable of enjoying themselves and yet constantly feel as if
pleasure is their right. They feel bad for themselves and bad for the
suffering of their fellow human beings. Stephen Carter, in The
Culture of Disbelief - How American Law and Politics Trivialize
Religious Devotion (1994), saw it as a product of incivility.
Citizens individually refused to sacrifice for the good of society as
a whole.
Carter argued that civilization was even possible
only if members of a community committed themselves to a code of
conduct. Citizens should understand it as virtuous to sacrifice their
own desires and freedom of choice for the good of the larger
community. When citizens refuse to make this sacrifice, civility
ceases, and a sense of isolation ensues. The open, public display of
private pleasure in the glass enclosure of the representative
audience forces others in their usual sheltered viewing room to
become aware of their failure to enjoy, and this is the basic dynamic
of indifference that characterizes the prevailing state of our
society.
McGowan also saw the school shootings in the United
States of America in the second half of the 1990s as a symptom of a
society in which there was a fear of possible "theft of
pleasure", "the other has already stolen one pleasure".
The losing party responded aggressively. The lack of pleasure made
the perpetrator see others as thieves. This was the case with the
Columbine shooters. The targets of the shooters were popular students
and athletes as well as some minority students. The
pseudo-revolutionary action against the powerful explains why the
shooter shot students who appeared to be helping themselves. I have
not been shot - at least not yet - but I have read dozens of texts
since my date ad went public about how impossible it is to get any
woman of any age group with that coefficient and other
characteristics. The prospect of another person's pleasure, or mere
openness to it, provokes downright aggressive social media rage.
McGowan foresees the disintegration of
society in a loss of cohesion. Disconnection, incivility and
widespread hostility to authority threaten the very existence of the
social world. According to him, Sigmund Freud wrote in 1930 in
Unbehagen in der Kultur (Our Distressing Culture) about this
dangerous point where primary hostility threatens to take over the
social order.
According to Freud, 'As a result of this
primary hostility between people, civilised society is constantly
threatened with disintegration. The interest of common work would not
hold it together; instinctive passions are stronger than rational
interests. Civilization must use all its powers to set limits to the
aggressive instincts of man."
In order to save the
social order, a society of control is being built at the same time,
especially in the hysterical fear of those in power.
Best regards, Juha
 |
Juha Molari,
BBA, Doctor of Theology
juhamolari@gmail.com
GSM +358 40 684 1172
|
