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Anurag Chauhan
The Future of an Illusion: Sigmund Freud on Religion, Science and Human Civilization
Ignorance is ignorance; no right to believe anything can be derived from it.
In March, 1610, Galileo announced to the world, in his Message from the Stars, the discovery of the telescope. “That universe,” as he was to say later, “that I enlarged a hundred and a thousand times from what the wise men of all past ages had thought” was not only bringing in its message new and unimagined things in heaven. It was also bringing new ideas to the mind of its discoverer, writes Giorgio de Santillana with his unraveling words in “The Crime of Galileo”.
Galileo Galilei is probably the easiest of names that comes to mind when we try to think of the revolutionary personalities who lived and struggled for the birth of modern physics and plainly, the scientific temperament as a whole. Why “temperament” seems to be underlining here is because of the enslavement of thoughts to the stern and moronic mentality of blind beliefs, that once used to prevail as the law of the western society. And it won’t be wrong to call the likes of Galileo the freedom fighters, those who fought for something that came to constitute the foundation of modern human condition.
"Scientific endeavor and social authority, in one form or another, are characteristics of man's life on this planet that are expected to endure for as long as we can see ahead." - Giorgio de Santillana
We know what Galileo and other greats had to go through and how they shone so bright and dissipated the dark corners of the society and galvanized the rusted psyche of the masses.
But the questions still remain - why did they have to suffer and struggle at all? What is behind that psyche that resists whatever comes its way? What is the history and the future of this rusting illusion?
The Future of an Illusion
On the reason of the existence of this religious and cultural predominance, Sigmund Freud explained in his “The Future of an Illusion” that, “While mankind has made continual advances in its control over nature and may expect to make still greater ones, it is not possible to establish with certainty that a similar advance has been made in the management of human affairs; and probably at all periods, just as now once again, many people have asked themselves whether what little civilization has thus acquired is indeed worth defending at all.”
Freud further says, “One has, I think, to reckon with the fact that there are present in all men destructive, and therefore anti-social and anti-cultural trends, and that in a great number of people these are strong enough to determine their behavior in human society.”
In Freud’s view, “There are two widespread human characteristics which are responsible for the fact that the regulations of civilization can only be maintained by a certain degree of coercion namely, that men are not spontaneously fond of work and that arguments are of no avail against their passions.”
So, it is the need for the management of human instincts and coercion for the sake of preserving what civilizations have earned and to maintain an order within the society, that gave birth to these dogmatic rules and ideologies which over the course of time took an extremely ugly form. And later on, Freud even goes on to explains why this ugliness came to existence and why it was bound to happen.
Peculiar Value of Religious Ideas
In what does the peculiar value of religious ideas lie?
Sigmund Freud replies to his imaginary opponent who follows him with mistrust that, “It is true that nature would not demand any restrictions of instinct from us, she would let us do as we liked; but she has her own particularly effective method of restricting us. She destroys us coldly, cruelly, relentlessly, as it seems to us, and possibly through the very things that occasioned our satisfaction.”
“It was precisely because of these dangers with which nature threatens us that we came together and created civilization, which is also,” Freud reasons, “among other things, intended to make our communal life possible. For the principal task of civilization, its actual raison d'etre, is to defend us against nature.”
While connecting the dots and discovering the inherent relation between religion and civilization, the father of psychoanalysis sprays the lucidity of his ideas,
“religious ideas have arisen from the same need as have all the other achievements of civilization: from the necessity of defending oneself against the crushingly superior force of nature. To this a second motive was added - the urge to rectify the shortcomings of civilization which made themselves painfully felt.
…
Moreover, it is especially apposite to say that civilization gives the individual these ideas, for he finds them there already; they are presented to him ready-made, and he would not be able to discover them for himself. What he is entering into is the heritage of many generations, and he takes it over as he does the multiplication table, geometry, and similar things.”
Freud asserts that “The fact here is that this body of religious ideas is usually put forward as a divine revelation. But this presentation of it is itself a part of the religious system, and it entirely ignores the known historical development of these ideas and their differences in different epochs and civilizations.”
Genesis of Religious Dogma
Sigmund Freud, in the third part, presses on looking at the whole picture holistically and it is then, not difficult to observe the obviosity in the way the things have taken shape over the various limits of space and time.
Explaining the human aspect behind the religious credo, Freud says, “A great deal is already gained with the first step: the humanization of nature. Impersonal forces and destinies cannot be approached; they remain eternally remote.”
“But if the elements have passions that rage as they do in our own souls, if death itself is not something spontaneous but the violent act of an evil Will, if everywhere in nature there are Beings around us of a kind that we know in our own society, then we can breathe freely, can feel at home in the uncanny and can deal by psychical means with our senseless anxiety.”
Freud resolves on the fact that the existence of all the ideas of religions that we have today, have an extreme substantial foundation in the deep human core of reasoning and emotional passion. He illustrates that the origins of religious rituals and occults find the analogous reflection in the exact way humans function within their civilization and society — the paradigm of power plays a crucial role in the germination of religious seeds.
We are still defenceless, perhaps, but we are no longer helplessly paralysed; we can at least react. Perhaps, indeed, we are not even defenseless. “We can apply the same methods against these violent supermen outside that we employ in our own society;” Freud elucidates, “we can try to adjure them, to appease them, to bribe them, and, by so influencing them, we may rob them of a part of their power.”
A replacement like this of natural science by psychology not only provides human immediate relief, but also points the way to a further mastering of the situation. That the sense of helplessness leads to psychological fabrication of things, which we can control and exert some power over external reality.
Sigmund’s work further makes it explicit that,
“It is the infantile prototype, of which it is in fact only the continuation.” He believes that, “when man personifies the forces of nature he is following an infantile model. He has learnt from the persons in his earliest environment that the way to influence them is to establish a relation with them; and so, later on, with the same end in view, he treats everything else that he comes across in the same way as he treated those persons.”
“When the growing individual finds that he is destined to remain a child forever, that he can never do without protection against strange superior powers,” Freud deciphers the reality, “he lends those powers the features belonging to the figure of his father; he creates for himself the gods whom he dreads, whom he seeks to propitiate, and whom he nevertheless entrusts with his own protection. Thus, his longing for a father is a motive identical with his need for protection against the consequences of his human weakness.”
The defense against childish helplessness is what lends its characteristic features to the adult's reaction to the helplessness which he has to acknowledge — a reaction which is precisely the formation of religion. “But it is not my intention to enquire any further into the development of the idea of God;” Freud clarifies, “what we are concerned with here is the finished body of religious ideas as it is transmitted by civilization to the individual.”
Sigmund Freud here unravels the fundamental crux of the historical empire of beliefs which is nothing but an enlarged shadow of the human psyche and behavioral instincts.
We can see the burning innate creative spirit in the development of this great empire of beliefs. It is not about being wrong or right, but to realize the potential that humans have been gifted with by Mother Nature and the ability to blend it up with the dynamicity of life. What takes the form of wrong, or right is the way we employ that energy into civilization and society, and how it plays its role at the individualistic levels.
Psychology of Religious Ideas
What, then, is the psychological significance of religious ideas? And why does it take an ugly form?
Freud now gets deeper into the pragmatic effects of the dogmatism and takes us to the underlying core of the age-long rivalry of the “Religious fundamentalism and the Renaissance humanism”.
Freud propounds that, “Religious ideas are teachings and assertions about facts and conditions of external (or internal) reality which tell one something one has not discovered for oneself, and which lay claim to one's belief.”
“Since they give us information about what is most important and interesting to us in life,” Freud says, “they are particularly highly prized. Anyone who knows nothing of them is very ignorant; and anyone who has added them to his knowledge may consider himself much the richer.”
Freud reflects on the heredity of religious beliefs,
“These teachings deserve to be believed because they were already believed by our primal ancestors; secondly, we possess proofs which have been handed down to us from those same primaeval times; and thirdly, it is forbidden to raise the question of their authentication at all. In former days anything so presumptuous was visited with the severest penalties, and even to-day society looks askance at any attempt to raise the question again.”
They were these compulsive ideologies that made every possible effort to strangle the infant of science because it refused to obey the false. The immense power that churches and other religious authorities used to exercise over the past centuries have led to innumerable instances of coercion and resistance that took the ugly face of murders and public executions in the name of religion and faith.
Science and the Religious Belief
What is truth and how it is ingrained in every aspect of human life is a quest as old as the humanity itself. Over thousands of years, different generations of people have devised different ways in order to grasp this grand scheme of reality, first with the religious doctrines and then the scientific spirit.
Sigmund Freud claims that religion no longer has the same influence on people that it used to. “Criticism has whittled away the evidential value of religious documents,” He says, “natural science has shown up the errors in them, and comparative research has been struck by the fatal resemblance between the religious ideas which we revere and the mental products of primitive peoples and times.”
The scientific spirit brings about a particular attitude towards worldly matters; before religious matters it pauses for a little, hesitates, and finally there too crosses the threshold. In this process there is no stopping; the greater the number of men to whom the treasures of knowledge become accessible, the more widespread is the falling-away from religious belief - at first only from its obsolete and objectionable trappings, but later from its fundamental postulates as well.
In the long run nothing can withstand reason and experience, and the contradiction which religion offers to both is all too palpable. “No doubt if they confine themselves to a belief in a higher spiritual being,” Freud says, “whose qualities are indefinable and whose purposes cannot be discerned, they will be proof against the challenge of science; but then they will also lose their hold on human interest.”
On the immensity of scientific might and its search for truth, Sigmund Freud debates that, “Science has given us evidence by its numerous and important successes that it is no illusion. Science has many open enemies, those who cannot forgive her for having weakened religious faith and for threatening to overthrow it. She is reproached for the smallness of the amount she has taught us and for the incomparably greater field she has left in obscurity.”
Freud replies to his virtual opponent on an attempt made to discredit scientific endeavour in a radical way, on the ground that, it can yield nothing else than subjective results, whilst the real nature of things outside ourselves remains inaccessible.
In the first place, our organization — that is, our mental apparatus has been developed precisely in the attempt to explore the external world, and it must therefore have realized in its structure some degree of expediency.
In the second place, it is itself a constituent part of the world which we set out to investigate, and it readily admits of such an investigation.
Thirdly, the task of science is fully covered if we limit it to showing how the world must appear to us in consequence of the particular character of our organization.
Fourthly, the ultimate findings of science, precisely because of the way in which they are acquired, are determined not only by our organization but by the things which have affected that organization.
Finally, the problem of the nature of the world without regard to our percipient mental apparatus is an empty abstraction, devoid of practical interest.
Sigmund Freud shows with his knack for dissecting the psychology of human mind to the core of its truth, the important place science has taken in the heart of humanity. That with small developments within itself, it has been able to revolutionize the socio-economic realities of human society.
Freud hence puts this in his own style,
“No, our science is no illusion. But an illusion it would be to suppose that what science cannot give us we can get elsewhere.”
Read and Contemplate on the Nobel Laureate Gabriel Marquez's brillaint depiction of fragility our lives in his crime thriller, and then on John Keats's letters to his friend on the truth of imagination.
Get your own copy of Sigmund Freud 's “The Future of an Illusion” from here.
