Author: Ophelia Benson

Just a small thing. I wanted to extract and keep a couple of comments by Frederick Crews from a longish piece on Philip Rieff because I think they’re interesting.

“The question ‘What can Freud teach us about the relation between our impulses and civilization?’ ceases to be interesting if it transpires that Freud didn’t actually make the discoveries he claimed to have made about the psyche,” says Frederick C. Crews, a professor emeritus of English at the University of California at Berkeley and a leading Freud skeptic.

Of course – oddly – a lot of people – well actually not a lot of people, but a sizable proportion of people in certain disciplines – think questions about what Freud can teach us about relations between various things don’t cease to be interesting no matter how clear it becomes that Freud didn’t actually make the discoveries he claimed to have made about the psyche. Their fixed idea (one might even call it an idée fixe) of Freud’s insight and profundity and originality seems to float completely free of any actual ontological status for his ‘discoveries’ about the psyche. There’s something puzzling and disconcerting about that.

“Rieff was brilliant in assessing the schismatics’ more simplistic visions of liberation, and he left us with the sense that Freud’s tough-mindedness, while hardly sufficient as a replacement for actual supernatural belief, deserved our sympathy and respect.” But Mr. Crews continues: “My feeling today is that those books of Rieff’s were period pieces, in three senses: In the intellectual style of the era, they overrated the extent to which social stability depends on the ideas of literary intellectuals; they overrated Freud’s permanent interest as a scientific pioneer; and as a result, they took seriously the vacuous antinomies of Civilization and Its Discontents, whereby a measure of ‘repression,’ causing personal unhappiness, is deemed requisite to the preservation of culture.”

Eloquent, isn’t it. That’s why I wanted to pull it out.

Amusing thing about the (as it were) Theory of satirical dictionary writing. I took careful notes, just in case I ever need to write another.

In conducting this assault, Donaldson and Eyre are making an important point not only about the nature of modern celebrity but also about the nature of satire. The textbook definition of satire is that it flourishes in an age of clearly defined moral standards, or one in which those standards are only just beginning to break down. If you are trying to be funny about other people’s moral failings, in other words, there must be some broad agreement between you and your audience as to what a moral failing actually consists of.

Ah. Well, fortunately, we didn’t have that problem, or limitation, or requirement, because we weren’t trying to be funny about moral failings, but rather about intellectual or cognitive or epistemic ones. Different thing. Or not. Actually maybe not, because the tricky bit of what D J Taylor says there is ‘your audience’. All depends what you mean by ‘your audience,’ doesn’t it. If you have wild hopes of writing a book that everyone over the age of three will want to read, then that’s one kind of ‘broad agreement’ you’re after, whereas if you sanely expect to amuse the kind of people who are amused by the kind of thing you are writing, and no one else, then that’s another kind. Though actually we did argue about this quite a lot during the writing. One of the writers kept urging that we ought to have a few very obvious jokes so as not to turn off people who don’t get the other kind; the other never saw the point of that, because who is going to buy or read a book on the grounds that it has ten good jokes in it and 490 duds? Who is even going to find the obvious jokes among all the others? I still don’t see it. Isn’t Theory interesting.

Here in the age of Big Brother and Celebrity Love Island, alternatively, the satirist is faced with three disabling drawbacks. The first is that so many satirical targets, from John Prescott to Robbie Williams, are, as Craig Brown once despairingly put it, “beyond parody”.

Yup. That is indeed a disabling drawback. I know, because that’s why the publisher didn’t want a satirical guidebook to angels and pagans and Celtic wisdom and all that good stuff – because it parodies itself. Sad, isn’t it – there are people out there walking around and driving cars and working at jobs (none of them in medical or dental fields, let us devoutly hope) who are so silly that they can’t be parodied, they’ve already done it for you. Sad, but also very funny.

The second, at a time when formal yardsticks of human behaviour are snapping all around us like celery stalks, is that many people, served up with something that labels itself “satire”, are simply unaware that a joke is being made. Extraordinary as it may seem, a fair proportion of the populace probably imagines that reality TV is aspirational, or that Vanessa Feltz is a very interesting woman of whom a whole lot more should be heard.

Well…yes. Admittedly – the stuff Sylvia Browne writes is so bottomlessly ridiculous and hilarious and absurd, it would be very hard indeed to write anything that was even more so. So naturally it does become difficult to perceive that a joke is being made.

That’s almost tragic, in a way. The really ludicrous people and ‘movements’ are so extremely risible that they can’t be mocked – there is simply no room left – so only the more moderately ridiculous people and movements can be made fun of. That does seem like a terrible waste. Ah well.

The third drawback was recently identified by Clive James in his essay Save Us From Celebrity…What was the best way to stem the tide of rubbish in which the average TV watcher or newspaper reader is constantly deluged, he wondered. “Satire is one way, but the satirists become celebrities too.” Don’t they just? And so Mr James found himself on Parkinson, reciting one of his amusing poems to Posh Spice and David Bowie. The emasculated satirist, in fact, is one of the commonest sights in literary history. In later life Thackeray, famously, never produced any social critique quite so devastating as Vanity Fair, largely because its success brought him fame and dinner invitations from the Duke of Devonshire.

Ah – now that one is not a worry. That difficulty has been grandly, even regally surmounted. Success shall not spoil wosname. No. Fame and dinner invitations to Chatsworth will not emasculate this satirist, thank you very much, because the problem doesn’t arise. I don’t get dinner invitations from the people who sleep under Waterloo Bridge, let alone the Duke of Devonshire. And the one time I got the chance, when I was on that radio thing with nice Philip Adams, well, I didn’t sell out, did I. Not a bit of it. I was just as sarky and parodic and mocking as ever. So! My social critique will go on being just as devastating as it was last year, Dukes or no Dukes, I assure you. There’s integrity for you.

Speaking of fame and dinner invitations and radio and amusing poems, Julian is on ‘In Our Time’ tomorrow, so have a listen.

More (I know, but there are a lot of good items today, and I want to quote from them). From the always-rewarding Ishtiaq Ahmed – who teaches political science in Stockholm.

Are human beings united or estranged in their essence? Tragedies such as the October 8 earthquake in Pakistan bring out the best and the worst in human beings. We have heard how people volunteered to help, sometimes risking their own lives, when involved in rescue operations…Everyday we see foreigners engaged in providing medical aid, food, blankets and other help. They too represent the best qualities in human beings. We should never forget their sense of duty to fellow human beings.

That’s exactly what I meant the other day when I said that the guy who kicked Reginald Denny in the head might on a different day have rushed to rescue people from danger after an earthquake. I think that’s true. Disasters (can) bring out the best in people. We’re moody, we’re labile, we’re flighty and changeable and unsettled; we can hate people one minute and run into danger to save them the next. Or we can live peaceably next door to them for decades and then after listening to the radio for awhile decide to kill them all.

The most shameful and disgraceful reaction was that of Islamic obscurants who – even before the full tragedy had unfolded – had in their enthusiasm to score cheap and vulgar points against the Musharraf regime, opined that those hit by the earthquake were facing divine punishment because they had done nothing to prevent the Pakistan government from allying itself with the Americans against fellow Muslims such as the Taliban and Al Qaeda and being soft on India and Israel. I have, in subsequent exchanges with such utterly despicable custodians of Islam, demanded an explanation as to how schoolchildren and those several hundred pupils at a Quran school who also perished while reciting the sacred scriptures could do anything to change Pakistan’s foreign policy. There is, of course, no answer to give but we are told that we mortals do not understand how God works in human societies.

Yes, the Pat Robertson school of thought. If it ever rains hard in Dover, Pennsylvania, well – it’s all up with the people there because God won’t lift a finger. He’s too pissed off.

Why inflict so much pain and suffering on ordinary creatures, many of whom barely managed to stay alive even under normal circumstances? The answer one gets is silence or prevarication but never an admission that when they make such a statement they start playing God themselves and that is wrong. I have yet to meet an obscurantist who ever admits having made a mistake in interpreting the will of God.

And they not only start playing God themselves, they cheer on a God who inflicts pain and suffering on innocent impoverished people in order to make an unrelated point.

Consequently all philosophy and religious beliefs should be judged as benign or malevolent on the basis of how ideas are used to either advance the notion of a common humankind with the same needs for respect, love and security or to preach permanent war and hatred deriving from differences of faith and colour and so on. We can also safely assume that although each individual is unique, our survival as a species has been possible because of our ability to cooperate. We are united in our essence and not estranged.

Yes. Just say no to those who preach permanent war and hatred – no matter how passionate their grievance, no matter how intense their conviction, no matter how strong their feeling, no matter authentic their tradition. Just, No.

Slavoj Zizek says something interesting in the Voice.

“I am a mastodon,” he says. “I still believe in the big theories popular back in the ’70s. This distrust in big universal theory is the most dangerous ideology today. Look at all totalitarians, the really bad guys, Hitler, Stalin. Sorry, but none of them believed in big theory. Hitler was a historicist-relativist and so was Stalin! Often a reference to some absolute truth is necessary to resist totalitarian political power, so you can not lose hope.”

Right on. Good mastodon. Pat pat pat.

This is good. Not least because it cites a philosopher of science who has written several articles for B&W. A ‘holy man’ shows up in a village in India and performs some conjuring tricks – then unmasks himself. Score one for rationalism.

“We are rationalists” declares the intruder, Sanal Edamaruku, secretary general of the Indian Rationalist Association. “We have come here to show you how sadhus and god-men are using simple tricks to cheat you.” The sadhu himself is divested of wig and beard and revealed as a completely ungodly rationalist volunteer. He’s no guru – just very skilled at conjuring…The miracle is that the spell has been broken. Once the crowd have absorbed the shock, and broken into laughter, this poor, remote village has been liberated from superstition. Perhaps for ever.

Dear Indian Rationalist Association. Dear Indian rationalism – long may it flourish. Forever, in fact.

Despite a tenacious western orientalism which overemphasises and overvalues Indian religiosity, reinforced by the homegrown ‘Hindutva’ movement propagated by the BJP (anatomised by Meera Nanda in New Humanist Jan/Feb 2005), India has a long and distinguished rationalist tradition which is considerably older than that of the west. According to Nobel prize-winning economist Amartya Sen, the seeds of rationalism were planted many thousands of years before the Enlightenment.

It’s actually both orientalism and occidentalism (that is, anti-orientalism) that overemphasise and overvalue Indian religiosity. Kind of a lose-lose situation. People with silly dopy romantic exotic fantasies about India and anti-romantic postcolonialists join forces in declaring rationalism an inauthentic hegemonic import, a stalking horse for imperialism, a mere tool of capitalist efficiency, a disguised form of tyranny. Which is unfortunate.

Professor Desai is clear that while the forms of Indian activism can be an inspiration for a renewed practical western rationalist project, western traditions of rationalist and humanist thought remain an essential model for India: “Our entire enlightenment depends on the west, and we have a lot more to learn.” In his speech at the conference in 1999 which celebrated 100 years of the Rationalist Press Association (RPA), Sanal Edamaruku was explicit about the vital role played by the availability of cheap copies of classic western humanist texts, printed by the RPA, publishers of the journal you are reading now.

Dear RPA. Floreat.

I read something this morning in Frank Cioffi’s essay* ‘Was Freud a Liar?’ that grabbed my attention. It reminded me of something. I knew what, too.

Freud did not fall into the seduction error through believing his patients’ stories; he did not fall into it through ignorance of the fact that persons sexually molested in infancy may, nevertheless, not succumb to neurosis; he did not fall into it through underestimating the frequency of seduction in the general population. Freud fell into the seduction error through the use of a procedure which to this day remains the basis of the psychoanalytic reconstruction of infantile life: the attribution to patients of certain infantile experiences because they appear to the analyst to be living “through them with all the appropriate emotions.”

What did that remind me of? John Mack. You know John Mack? I’ve talked about him a little, but not enough, not yet. I’ve had it in mind to talk about him more though. He’s the Harvard psychologist who thought there was something to the whole alien abduction thing – not ‘something to’ it in the sense of as cultural phenomenon or symptom of mass lunacy, but in the sense of maybe real aliens really abducting real people and taking them onto real alienships and really impregnating them and doing medical exams on them. For real. And why did he think this? His main reason was that they had such strong emotions when they talked about it. They seemed (they appeared to the analyst) really really really frightened, upset, disturbed, traumatized.

And what is so interesting about that – or one thing, at least, that is so interesting about it – is that it seems so obvious that people having very strong emotions about something isn’t necessarily a reason to think that something refers to a real event. It seems so obvious 1) that there are other possible explanations and 2) that the other possible explanations are a great deal less unlikely than the alien abduction [of just a few people who can produce no physical evidence] scenario is. It’s interesting that such a bizarrely faulty bit of reasoning could be perpetrated by a Harvard psychologist. (Harvard thought so too. Harvard blushed. Harvard was not altogether pleased.) Credulity on that scale is surprising in an academic. Well, maybe it’s not. I know several people who would immediately tell me that that’s just the kind of person it’s not surprising in. They could have a point.

*Originally a radio talk for BBC 3 in 1973, published in The Listener, and in 1998 in the Frederick Crews edited collection Unauthorized Freud.