Freud, Environmentalism, Violence, and the Origin of Culture

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In two works, Totem and Taboo and Moses and Monotheism, Freud put forth that an event occurred of such horrifying significance that it scarred the human psyche and left a structure in place that still causes pathological behavior.

In Totem and Taboo, Freud states that a primal murder occurred. He says that the sons of a tyrannical father (a father who used actual castration to control the sexuality of the men in his tribe) banded together and conspired to murder their father. After this murder was carried out, the sons were overcome with guilt at what they had done. This act has traveled down the ages in the psyches of all humans, tainting the relationships of parents and children with the guilt over this past deed.

In Moses and Monotheism (a work Freud himself wanted to subtitle “a Historical Novel” ), Freud postulates that the original Moses was an Egyptian and an exiled follower of Akhnaten, the deicidic montheistic pharoah also known as Amenhotep IV. This Egyptian Moses led the Hebrews out of bondage and across the Sinai. The Jews grew tired of his strict rule and killed him, leaving his blood to pool in the Sinai sands and his body to be eaten by vultures. Unfortunately, this hasty murder, which is hinted at several times in the Torah, haunted the psyche of the Jewish people and caused the messianic complex that has been a part of Judaism since the Babylonian Exile.

In each work, Freud points to an extremely important problem of human existence - violence and its consequences. But this pointing to does not suffice as Freud’s subsequent theorizing is problematic, at the least. Freud is guilty of several mistakes in this area. Primarily, he has to rely on a gerry rigged Lamarckism to explain how this pathology is transmitted from generation to generation by means of the unconscious. As the most obvious forms of Lamarckism have fallen into disrepute and disfavor, the more subtle forms try to stay as hidden as possible. Yet now and then, they appear and show themselves to be as unreliable as their more quantifiable brethren. As far as I know, it is impossible to prove that the conscious decisions of one group of human beings approximately three or four thousand years ago now effect contemporary humanity unconsciously. Impossible, unless one throws aside the individualism of Freudianism and must rely in the mechanisms of culture. Now the only way that this might work would be that the culture creates institutions that can replicate these events over and over again in the minds of every individual that passes through that culture’s institutions. Now, if this is correct, Freud ends up being wrong and someone like Reich or some of the female opponents of Freud would be correct. Politics and Society end up playing a greater role in the formation of the individual’s character than do any unconscious impulses of the individual. So Freud is faced with a difficult decision - either be incorrect about the events that caused the structural problems of the unconscious or throw out his entire damned theory of unconscious processes and their influence. Now, at this point in 2004, Freud has been so generally problematized that to poke a hole in his theories is no great feat. However, this problem of nature, culture, violence, and individual behavior has no overriding theory that might serve to guide us. Thus far there’s not much to replace Freud. As such, we’re in the tough position of creating theory instead of critiquing theory. So, we have some tough questions. Is it possible that violence is the origin of all human culture? Did we undergo such a hellacious experience several thousand years ago that all the descendants of the sufferers thought so radically differently from the rest of humanity. There is an idea floating around that the climate changes of the stone age, that is, the process of expansion and contraction of the ice age (the appearance of the ice and the shrinking of the seas worldwide enabled man to expand his presence in the world, to explore new previously unreachable areas of the world, like the New World and Australia and New Zealand. All this is catastrophically followed by the destruction of low lying civilizations as the water levels rose following the melting ice - the idea of this destruction comes somewhat romantically from Graham Hancock and more scientifically from Colin Tudge and others) caused a huge climatic shift and this change caused humans to suffer through years of famine, drought, and other types of environmentally tough conditions. But is this verifiable? And how would this environmental change be recorded on the human unconscious and cause contemporary problems?

Perhaps our violent impulses are original to the human animal. Is Empedocles right to attribute strife as a foundational force of the universe? Or is violence the consequence of catastrophic climate change following the last ice age? Did this climate change and desertification of previously fertile areas cause humanity to become patriarchal and violent and repressive? Are Jim DeMeo and Marija Gimbutas full of imaginative shit? Did Old Europe really worship the goddess peacefully and was subsequently destroyed by the Axe -Wielding Indo European Sky God culture? Or are humans fundamentally violent and all these ideas based on bad lamarckism and even worse romanticism?

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uh, without force the universe would exist. just not the way we know it. the creation of the universe was love, force is what tears it apart. if there weren’t force the world would be united in a single sphere, perfect harmony and love. force keeps tearing it apart, creating random occurences that we must cope with. just so alls not lost, love and force are binded by necessity to keep acting on each other so as to continue this endless cycle. why? the universe never really like humans, i don’t think.

the search for a single temporal occurence to explain an attribute of human existence seems itself a throwback to romanticism my dear. i don’t think humans are shaped in such a linear, ‘progressive’ fashion. a very modern idea, but we’ve past modernism by now, no?

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Are you interpreting from Empedocles or improvising freely here?

No of course the single temporal occurence is just flat wrong. Really my question is: how do violent cultural practices instantiate themselves in the heads of little kids? Perhaps I am oversimplifying here.

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that’s empedocles, my ontology errs more on the spinozist side.

seems that you’re still holding that assumption, except on an indivudal scale. also, maybe the violence doesn’t come from the head, but the heart. and why would an event cause this? i don’t think we intially have much control of the formation of feelings, kids can get pissed off at how an ant walks, really. feelings just flow, chemsitry really.

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I will at some point throw this post on its head by introducing the ideas of a pet theorist of mine, Rene Girard. My work over the last 10 months or so has seen me explore many aspects of his mimetic theory, looking at its place in relation to psychoanalysis, as well as exploring its repeated validation in recent imitation research and in neuroscience.

To whet your appetites, I should point out that Girard’s notion of culture is underlined by the question of violence; all culture is simply a reflex keeping in check an inbuilt impulse to mimetic violence in human relationships. I for one see Girard’s mimetic theory, and the important elaboration from Eric Gans, as of enormous importance to the social sciences, for our understanding the origins of our species, and the mechanisms by which all cultural products are generated. Until that post is delivered, I will in fact be helping a mimetic scholar (at my university) draft his work on the symbolic structures of communist and democratic regimes. It is very much a work of political anthropology, using mimetic theory as its starting point.

Until next week, Leo,x

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Hi Pangloss good you to see you about again!

I’m very interested in all things mimetic and your pet author seems to be looking at something I was thinking about a little while ago. You might find the following link interesting.

Social Advances through technology using Bible as Example

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Hi Pax, thanks for the link, though to be honest I’m not too interested in Girard’s analysis of the biblical texts, though I do recognise their uniqueness in the grand canon of founding myths that underlie the genesis of all communities and cultural categories. Regarding the article itself though, I should point out that the sophistication and often esoteric nature of much Christian hermeunetics does expose the farce (in terms of straight truth-seeking) that is using the Bible as a set of metaphors, sacrilised as the Word. Similar ‘creative interpretation’ of other less-sacrilised dramatic texts (Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, Euripides’ Bacchae, Lars von Trier’s Dogville, early Bergman films, to name a few of the many) can yield similar insights as to the underlying pattern to human relations and the means by which a community is structured and understood following a cultural crisis.

Which brings me (almost neatly) onto my short discussion of the work of Rene Girard, and its importance in understanding the relationship between violence and the origin of culture. However, before starting this, it’s perhaps worth explaining where Girard’s and Freud’s thought converge and diverge.

Like Freud, Girard’s account of human anthropology is rooted in a set of hypotheses regarding non-conscious motivation. Unlike Freud though, Girard does not bother qualifying his account of human desire with direct links to sexual or so-called ‘survival-desire’. For Girard, an object of desire is always mediated by a model, a person whose percieved being and desire is appropriated or imitated. This reciprocal mechanism - of imitating the percieved desire of another person - has seen great validation in recent neuroscience research, with the discover of mirror neurons in all primates (particularly efficient in humans!). Girard’s notion of mimetic desire - the non-conscious appropriative drive to imitate other people’s desires wants intentions and goals - is the root of what has been identified as a mimetic process from desire to rivalry to violence. Mimetic rivalry occurs between a subject and his/her model, when the model is alerted to the desirability of the desired object (be it an object, a style, a belief, a sexual object) and a situation arises in which ‘two hands reach simultaneously for the same object’. If unanimity is not achieved between the model and subject (as original subject becomes model and vice versa - both ‘model obstacles’ to the commonly desired object), a cycle of negative reciprocity develops and forms a crescendo of passions, a contraction of both protagonists respective fields of consciousness, as the original object of desire is no longer relavant and all that matters is a kind of existential fight between model/subject and model/subject, a duel, which is characterised by descreasingly veiled ‘blows’, and then a final blow in which one protagonist triumphs.

Girard’s explication of this kind of escalation of mimetic passions can be used to explain the unanimising mechanisms that are in place to keep in check an inbuilt impulse to violence. This he refers to as the scapegoat mechanism, where rivalrous beings achieve unanimity by converging upon a common ‘victim’, using any rationale available to dehumanise him and justify the newly formed boundary. In a sacrificial crisis of this kind, a boundary will be maintained by a commonly-observed symbolisation of the victim and ritualisation of the sacrificial act. Guy Fawkes and bonfire night in Britain is one explicit example of how a community replenishes its symbolic resources to reaffirm the existence of a community (in this case, a political community, complete with threatened parliamentary sovereignty) Mimetic-scapegoat theory offers a hypothesis that makes the formation of cultural boundaries intelligible, also providing an insight as to what underlying processes impel human action, creativity, ideas, all distinction, all culture. It requires an understanding of individual desire as essentially decentred (though it does not deny the possibility of certainty, as do ‘post-structuralist’ thinkers), mediated through models in one’s immediate life setting. The link with violence, as an underlying threat to social and physical survival, is made in understanding how mimesis works to create and destroy a human being, as a desiring individual, and as a percieved individual.

Freud seems to hypothesise the founding murder as something repressed in the human psyche, and not only stored in the unconscious, but genetically transferred from one generation to the next. One guilty act, cannot have its memory genetically passed on to its offspring. The human mind is only not a blank slate in terms of structures available to take in a particular culture. It is for this reason that Totem and Taboo is Freud’s least appreciated, and in my view least understood, work. What Freud was intuitively grasping was the importance of an underlying act of sacrifice to each human community, or cultural category - how the religious distinctions of the sacred and profane were built around the unique duel status of the victim as the cause of the crisis, but also its solution and saviour. Both Freud and Girard link this to the universal existence of Gods in all cultures. Where Freud went wrong was in interpreting the safcrifical crisis within the terms of his defficient framework of human development desire and consciousness. Reducing all desire to sex, understanding all action with the conceptual muddle of the Oedipus Complex, Freud obliged himself to assume that the founding murder MUST have been of the father, in the same way that all young desire is for the mother - that these figures are, without exception, the subject’s model, and that any deviation from this is evidence of repressed desire manifest, a hiccup in the subject’s psychosexual development.

Despite the mistake of reducing these features of communal life to psychoanalytic categories, Freud must be credited for falling upon these insights in the first place. It is a testament to his unrelenting intellectual curiosity and intergrity that he produced that two works of such contradiction. I am certain that Freud would have dropped many of his central concepts had he lived longer and that he would have been sympathetic to the more minimal account of violence and religion that mimetic-scapegoat theory offers.

To read Girard’s full critique of Freud, and more interestingly, the above argument as written more convincingly fully professionally etc, I recommend Girard’s magnum uber opus ‘Violence and the Sacred’, a book attracting an increasingly more receptive audience. I also recommend his discussion with two psychologists in ‘Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World’ for his fullest critique of Freud.

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I don’t mean to look quite so forlorn, but why on earth did noone ever reply to this?