Does Biology = Morality?

With sociobiology gaining credibility these days since its first debut back the 1970s, people have recourse more and more to their "evolutionary script" as rationale for various messy behaviors and random motivations.  Instead of "the heart wants what it wants," we have "natural selection made me do it!" This underlying biological imperative provides a logic as it were to what otherwise might be a simple appeal to instinct, passion or appetite as wildly impulsive drives holding the ego captive...

Incantation (of the Sacred Forest)

Incantation by Paul Serusier

The Man Without Qualities

Robert Musil's amazing book is a hidden gem and arguably the most under-rated, overlooked, under-read novel of the 20th century - yet still very prophetic and timely...

How to Read the Bible by James Kugel

If you're looking to read a thought-provoking account of the Bible from an expert in the field (i.e. former Harvard professor) with  a very fine appreciation of ancient Hebrew and all its subtle nuances,  and if you don't mind having your complacent set of assumptions challenged somewhat, this might be the book for you. If you already know how to read the Bible just fine thank you - without any knowledge of ancient Hebrew or ancient Greek (for that matter) or familiarity with basic hermeneutics or reliance upon the vast field of biblical scholarship that has grown up over the past 200 years or consultation on the subject from people with first-rate minds, and you feel like just "going solo" as it were, relying on personal intuition or inspiration or external authority or sacred adamantine tradition,  then please let me know what your secret is... [I mean, what would you say in reply to what this author has to say? Is it possible to simply avoid what these scholars have said?] Alternatively, if you're feeling lost, disoriented, confused, spiritually empty, restless, aimless, longing for insight, guidance and direction,  willing to make your pilgrimage for even one drop of divine revelation, this might not be the book for you - because this book deals with how different generations of people going back to ancient times- understood the stories and edicts and prophecies of the scriptures - oftentimes at odds with we might wish as the "moral interpretation" of text.  It shows us the history of interpretation gradually altering content.  

Philip Rieff and the Curse of Modernity

"Rieff’s first book (his best, in my opinion) was a penetrating and imaginative study, Freud: The Mind of the Moralist (1959). At the time, most people considered Freud an immoralist—a proponent of liberation. Morality was supposedly what made us ill, posing unreasonable demands on behalf of “civilization” and forcing our healthy instinctual passions underground, into the unconscious, from which they tried to escape by way of “symptoms.” These symptoms were strangled protests against the tyranny of culture over nature. The psychoanalytic cure was a protracted guerrilla campaign, aiming to take over one inner stronghold after another without provoking an all-out counterattack in the form of a nervous breakdown...The Mind of the Moralist was a vigorous dissent from this standard interpretation. Rieff’s point was not just that, unlike his noisier disciples, Freud was temperamentally conservative, rating order as highly as freedom and restraint as highly as expression. This stance could be (and regularly was) dismissed as reflexive Victorian/Viennese caution. On the contrary, Rieff argued, Freud’s caution was well-founded. He understood that he had not really explained away our primal, nameless sense of guilt, which lay beneath the more superficial and intelligible constraints imposed by culture, with the implausible hypothesis of a primal crime. And yet, for this resolute unbeliever, such guilt could have no rational basis—who, after all, was humankind accountable to?

Rieff’s explanation of what there is to be guilty about was repeated in many books over many years, with increasing urgency (and, it must be said, portentousness). Human possibilities are limitless; about this he seemed to agree with Freud’s liberationist successors. But what excited them terrified him—and, he claimed, everyone else, at least before the triumph of the therapeutic ethos. Our primal endowment—formless, destructive, uncontrollable instinct—paralyzes and isolates us. We cannot trust ourselves or one another until a firm structure of interdictions has been installed in everyone’s psyche. These must be expounded by an interpretive elite, ratified through a calendar of rituals, and enforced by stern authority. Every culture is a dialectic of prohibition and permission, renunciation and release. Freud would have agreed; but whereas his followers concluded that the original “yes” of instinct was silenced, or at least muted, by the “no” of repressive authority, Rieff countered that instinct was cacophonous and only the original, creative “no” gave it a distinct voice. As he put it in The Mind of the Moralist—his style, already a little melodramatic, foreshadowing his later, full-blown apocalyptic abstractions—the primal self is “in a panic to express the fecundity of its own emptiness” and must be mastered by “unalterable authority.” For if “everything could be expressed by everyone identically,” then “nothing would remain to be expressed individually.” Hence the “irreducible and supreme activity of culture” is to “prevent the expression of everything,” thereby precluding “the one truly egalitarian dominion: nothingness.”

For most educated (and even many uneducated) Westerners, however, all formerly unalterable authorities now lie in the dust, like Ozymandias. Science has banished the supernatural, technology has vanquished scarcity, and so, having lost its parents, ignorance and misery, morality is now an orphan. This is the triumphalist view of modernity, and Rieff shared it; only instead of a triumph, he thought it a catastrophe. The dimensions of this catastrophe dawned on him gradually. The last chapter of Freud is “The Emergence of Psychological Man,” a tentative sketch of what modernity had wrought. Until the twentieth century, in Rieff’s account, three character types had successively prevailed in Western culture: political man, the ideal of classical times, dedicated to the glory of his city; religious man, the ideal of the Christian era, dedicated to the glory of God; and a transitional figure, economic man, a creature of Enlightenment liberalism. Economic man believed in doing good unto others by doing well for himself. This convenient compromise did not last long, and what survived of it was not the altruism but the egoism. Psychological man was frankly and shrewdly selfish, beyond ideals and illusions, at best a charming narcissist, at worst boorish or hypochondriacal, according to his temperament." - from George Scialabba, "The Curse of Modernity" in The Boston Review.

Philip Rieff - Cultural Theorist

L.T. on Liberalism and Literature

"A liberal is a person who believes that the right economic system, the right political reforms, the right undergraduate curriculum, and the right psychotherapy will do away with unfairness, snobbery, resentment, prejudice, neurosis, and tragedy. The argument of “The Liberal Imagination” is that literature teaches that life is not so simple—for unfairness, snobbery, resentment, prejudice, neurosis, and tragedy happen to be literature’s particular subject matter. In Trilling’s celebrated statement: “To the carrying out of the job of criticizing the liberal imagination, literature has a unique relevance . . . because literature is the human activity that takes the fullest and most precise account of variousness, possibility, complexity, and difficulty.” This is why literary criticism has something to say about politics." ... "But now he seemed convinced that every social and personal pathology, from revolutionary violence to narcissism, comes from the refusal to accept that life is conditioned—by the capacities we inherit, by the circumstances we are born into, by the people whose desires conflict with ours, by death." -from Louis Menand's 2008 New Yorker essay on Lionel Trilling