THE FEELING MAY BE RIGHT BUT THE RESPONSE IS WRONG
We find civilization in the gap between reason and our emotions
We live in a frightening time when the forces of irrationality threaten our democracy. But ratchet this fear one notch lower and we can state it in more visceral terms: Irrationality is exploding the veneer of civilization.
The moment we are in causes me to recall a book I read long ago, Sigmund Freud's Civilization and Its Discontents. In fact, this volume was on the reading list of Columbia University's Contemporary Civilization course I taught when I was scratching out my doctoral dissertation. “CC”, as it was known, is a survey course of the great books of Western thought and lies at the center of Columbia's core curriculum. It was reputed to be the most demanding undergraduate course Columbia required of all its students, and it was mind-opening for me as well as my students.
It has long been “in” to knock Freud if not discount him altogether. But as my mentor, Cornel West, used to say, “never give an undialectical 'yes' or 'no' to any thinker.” Much better to engage in dialogue and challenge one's own thought than to reject wholesale and remain intellectually unchallenged. Freud may have said many things that have become unfashionable or have fallen into disuse. We don't give much credence to penis envy any longer and I suspect all but a few remaining orthodox Freudian analysts make much use of dream analysis, though Freud felt that his The Interpretation of Dreams was his magnum opus.
But Freud was also an incisive and brilliant thinker and wholesale dismissal of his thought is facile and foolish. I have long felt that the basic premise of Civilization and Its Discontents is valid. For Freud our psychology is rooted in our biology. We are animals, and our impulses and drives lie at the foundation of our behavior. In short, we are beasts with minds. When it comes to impulses and drives, Freud was willing, I think somewhat courageously, to shock his Victorian peers by identifying those drives as sex and also aggression.
If we are going to live together then Freud concluded that humanity has to engage in a fundamental and universal trade off. To sustain civilized cooperation we need to suppress our basic instincts, the expression of which would bring release and gratification. Hence, the cost of civilization is that we all walk around at least somewhat unhappy. When asked to explain the purpose of his psychoanalysis, Freud said something like the following: “The purpose of psychoanalysis is to relieve the sufferer of his neurotic unhappiness in order to restore him to the general unhappiness of humankind.” That felicitous Freudian quote is among my favorites.
It is not surprising that Freud was a pessimist with regard to the human prospect. The only statement of qualified optimism in his entire corpus is found in his text The Future of An Illusion which picks up the sensibilities expressed in Civilization and Its Discontents. The illusion is religion, which Freud derides as infantile and a mass neurosis. It represents the childhood of humankind which Freud commends us to outgrow. The only force that provides any hope of our doing so, however slim, Freud identifies as intellect or reason. It is the human faculty that is also aligned with civilization. In a statement that has always stayed with me, Freud wrote: “The voice of the intellect is a soft one, but it does not rest until it has gained a hearing. Ultimately, after endlessly repeated rebuffs, it succeeds. This is one of the few points in which it may be optimistic about the future of mankind, but in itself it signifies not a little.” Maybe he is right, but our current situation places even that modest hope in doubt.
In most basic terms Freud places into mutual opposition our impulses and attendant feelings, on the one hand, over against the restraining civilizing forces of reason and intellect, on the other. In these times of resurgent irrationality, when the primordial forces of the id have exploded onto the landscape, again I can only hope that herein Freud is correct.
I want to apply this dialectic of emotion and reason to three hot button issues in an attempt to retrieve what is necessary and essential if civilization and not barbarism is to be our fate.
For years I was devoted in working to abolish the death penalty. My position in opposition to capital punishment is absolute and my primary reason for opposing it is ethical. There are many arguments invoked in opposition to the death penalty. It is immoral, it is barbaric and ghoulish, there is always the possibility of executing the innocent, and it is overwhelmingly racist (as well as classist) in application. Though I would seldom publicly raise the point, despite popular presumptions, it is far more costly to execute the convicted than to incarcerate the offender for his entire life, even if he is sentenced to prison when he is young.
There are only two major arguments on the other side supporting the death penalty: the contention that it is needed to deter subsequent murders, and that morality, that is,retributive justice, demands it.
The deterrence argument can be dispensed with for anyone who is disposed to be compelled by facts. Social scientific study after study going back to the 50s have failed to find a deterrent effect for the death penalty. To be clear, capital punishment may deter an individual prospective murderer from carrying out his crime out of fear of execution, but this cannot be known, Our laws can only be based on empirical evidence not supposition, and, as stated, no deterrent effect has been found.
The argument from morality is more legitimately debatable. In its most basic terms, it proclaims that if a person takes another life morality demands that the only legitimate punishment is that he forfeit his own. This moral claim ensures that capital punishment is potentially infinitely debatable since this moral argument is not empirically resolvable.
I reject it because my morality leads to other conclusions. In my view the death penalty is unacceptable because, like torture, it is the ultimate assault on human dignity. Dignity is correlative to a person's autonomy, freedom and agency. Capital punishment escalates the power of the state to infinity and the reduces the agency of the condemned to zero. This, as implied, leads to the absolute assault on human dignity, which my ethics forbids. Moreover, with capital punishment, the state enters into the moral universe of the most despised and appropriates that universe for itself. It debases the state as it violates the condemned, and in a democracy, it makes us all complicit in this act of premeditated killing.
This is my moral position, but I want to give my opponent his or her due. Where I am leading is to the conclusion that the interlocutor might be right, namely the murderer morally deserves to forfeit his life. But here is my point: It is not a contradiction to state that the perpetrator of the ultimate crime deserves to die but we ought not to kill him. We ought not to kill him for many compelling reasons some of which I cited in the list of reasons to oppose the death penalty.
The death penalty evokes powerful emotions. I have worked with families who have lost loved one's to murder, and the consequences for those families are simply horrible. Some death penalty advocates, and especially politicians, argue that we need to execute the murderer in order to achieve justice and to assuage the feelings of those who have lost a beloved family member.
Here's my central point: We can sympathize with the family's hurt and the resultant anger. We can affirm that the feeling for revenge is right but conclude that the response, in this case the execution of the perpetrator at the hands of the state, is wrong.
I believe that capital punishment is a barbaric practice. Its exemplification leads me to the philosophical position, suggested by Freud's observation that in the gap between the feeling and the response to which the feeling gives rise, is where civilization resides. Giving free rein to our impulses and instincts brings us back to our animal natures. Restraining our instincts and emotions, and choosing to otherwise elevates us to the realm of dignity and civilization.
A second application of this principle can be found in the phenomenon of racial bigotry. Suppose a white person is mugged by an African-American. The result for the victim can be lasting anger and especially fear, perhaps trauma. It may result in a fear and hatred of all Blacks. This person later hears an unverified report of a Black man assaulting another Caucasian, and draws the conclusion in the absence of evidence that the purported assailant is guilty. His emotions wash over and drown out the details of the case. The person's fear and anger are perhaps understandable but his conclusion is not. It is what we call bigotry, and bigotry has no place in a society governed by civilized standards. Guilt and innocence need to be subjected to the test of evidence, and to facts in each individual case. The attendant faculty is reason, not emotion. Again, the feeling of pain and anger may be right, but the response is wrong.
The #me-too movement has been a long time coming. Violence against women, especially sexual violence, is rampant. UN surveys find that globally one third of all women experience violence, often at the hands of intimate partners, but the real numbers are probably higher.
Not being a woman, fear and the cautions that women experience and engage are perforce beyond my subjective experience. Yet I was partnered to a wonderful women in a very engaged marriage for 41 years. I raised three daughters and have six granddaughters now teenagers or older, the most vulnerable years for being victims of assault. I harbor concern for their safety.
The victimization of women has been historically redoubled in that women have frequently not reported their abuse to authorities, and for valid reasons. There is often shame in victimization and far too often their claims have not been believed. It is an insidious and very damaging manifestation of patriarchal reality that permeates the culture.
It is a very good thing that these realities are beginning to change. But such social upheavals unearth a great deal of societal emotions compounded by the oppression of the ages. A valid concern is that in society's attempts to redress historical wrongs, we may at times swing in the opposite direction. There may be a rush to judgment and men who are innocent may be judged guilty of violations before the facts are in or the evidence weighed. The societal groundswell of feelings may overwhelm facts. It is, again, understandable but not commendable,
Abuse exists on a spectrum and there is a world of difference between the sexist remark, on the other hand, and rape on the other. Emotions of the moment may conjoin all sexist manifestations into the same category. But if we are to sustain a decent and fair society, the rule of evidence, due process and facts must be the employed standards for assessing culpability in all cases. They must have the last word.
When it comes to victimization of all types, our feelings may be right. But feelings fueling actions unfiltered by the civilizing standard of facts and reason may be wrong.
The point once more is that in the space between reason and emotion - that is where we find civilization. In these times when feelings are aflame and too often guide actions and lead to misplaced judgment, it is a fundamental truth we neglect at our peril.