Becker—Escape From Evil (iv)

Ernest Becker
Escape From Evil
(1975)

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CHAPTER TEN

Retrospect and Conclusion:
What Is the Heroic Society?

. . . if we can no longer live the great symbolisms
of the sacred in accordance with the original belief
in them, we can, we modern men, aim at a second
naiveté in and through criticism.
Paul Ricoeur

...

As far as the science of man is concerned, many thinkers since the Enlightenment have believed that everything is possible for a science of society. ... All we have to do, they claim, is to change the structure of things and a new society will emerge...

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... Revolutionaries still today trumpet this philosophy of history as the fall of pure men into corrupt social structures.

The reason the philosophy is so attractive is that men need hopes and ideals to urge them on—... All truths are part-truths as far as creatures are concerned, and so there is nothing wrong with an illusion that is creative. Up to a point, of course: the point at which the illusion lies about something very important, such as human nature. If it is false to that, then it becomes oppressive, because if you try falsely to make a new beginning you fail. I know that this bit of wisdom is already stale to our epoch, but even in its staleness we can't let go of it. ... Marxism in its traditional form is simply not a correct guide for a new society. But the irony is that we simply do not know what to do with this stale truth. That is why there is such a crisis in Marxist thought, in leftist-humanist thought. ...

History

Well, for one thing—one great thing—we now see history as it really has been in terms of overall psychodynamics. ...

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... Man immunizes himself against terror by controlling his fascination, by localizing it and developing working responses toward the sources of it. The result is that he becomes a reflex of small terrors and small fascinations in place of overwhelming ones. ... From this point of view history is the career of a frightened animal who has to deaden himself against life in order to live. And it is this very deadening that takes such a toll of others' lives.

All organisms want to perpetuate themselves, continue to experience and to live. It is a great mystery that we don't understand but observe every day:... ...men are truly sorry creatures because they have made death conscious. Consciousness means too that they have to be preoccupied with evil even in the absence of any immediate danger; their lives become a meditation on evil and a planned venture for controlling it and forestalling it.

The result is one of the great tragedies of human existence, what we might call the need to "fetishize evil," to locate the threat to life in some special places where it can be placated and controlled. It is tragic precisely because it is sometimes very arbitrary:...

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A second result of man's animal vulnerability to death and his symbolic consciousness of it is the struggle to get power to fortify himself. Other animals must simply use those powers that nature provided them with and the neural circuits that animate those powers. But man can invent and imagine powers, and he can invent ways to protect power. This means, as Nietzsche saw and shocked his world with, that all moral categories are power categories; they are not about virtue in any abstract sense. ...

So we see that as an organism man is fated to perpetuate himself and as a conscious organism he is fated to identify evil as the threat to that perpetuation. In the same way, he is driven to individuate himself as an organism, to develop his own peculiar talents and personality. And what, then, would be the highest development and use of those talents? To contribute to the struggle against evil, of course. In other words, man is fated, as William James saw, to consider this earth as a theater for heroism, and his life as a vehicle for heroic acts which aim precisely to transcend evil. Each person wants to have his life make a difference in the life of mankind, contribute in some way toward securing and furthering that life, make it in some ways less vulnerable, more durable. To be a true hero is to triumph over disease, want, death. One knows that his life has had vital human meaning if it has been able to bring real benefits to the life of mankind. And so men have always honored their heroes, especially in religion, medicine, science, diplomacy, and war. Here is where heroism has been most easily identifiable. From Constantine and Christ to Churchill and De Gaulle, men have called their heroes "saviors" in the literal sense: those who have delivered them from the evil of the termination of life, either of their own immediate lives or of the duration of their people. Even more, by his own death the hero secures the lives of others, and so the greatest heroic sacrifice, as Frazer taught

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us, is the sacrifice of the god for his people. We see this in Oedipus at Colonus, in Christ, and today in the embalmed Lenin. The giants died to secure mankind; by their blood we are saved. It is almost pathetically logical how man the supremely vulnerable animal developed the cult of the heroic.

But if we add together the logic of the heroic with the necessary fetishization of evil, we get a formula that is no longer pathetic but terrifying. It explains almost all by itself why man, of all animals, has caused the most devastation on earth—the most real evil. He struggles extra hard to be immune to death because he alone is conscious of it; but by being able to identify and isolate evil arbitrarily, he is capable of lashing out in all directions against imagined dangers of this world. This means that in order to live he is capable of bringing a large part of the world down around his shoulders. History is just such a testimonial to the frightening costs of heroism. The hero is the one who can go out and get added powers by killing an enemy and taking his talismans or his scalp or eating his heart. He becomes a walking repository of accrued powers. Animals can only take in food for power; man can literally take in the trinkets and bodies of his whole world. Furthermore, the hero proves his power by winning in battle; he shows that he is favored by the gods. Also, he can appease the gods by offering to them the sacrifice of the stranger. The hero is, then, the one who accrues power by his acts, and who placates invisible powers by his expiations. He kills those who threaten his group, he incorporates their powers to further protect his group, he sacrifices others to gain immunity for his group. In a word, he becomes a savior through blood. From the head-hunting and charm-hunting of the primitives to the holocausts of Hitler, the dynamic is the same: the heroic victory over evil by a traffic in pure power. And the aim is the same: purity, goodness, righteousness—immunity. Hitler Youth were recruited on the basis of idealism; the nice boy next door is the one who dropped the bomb on Hiroshima; the idealistic communist is the one who sided with Stalin against his former comrades: kill to protect the heroic revolution, to assure the victory over evil. As Dostoevsky saw, killing is sometimes distasteful, but the distaste is swallowed if it is necessary to true heroism: as one of the revolutionaries asked Pyotr Verhovensky in The Possessed, when they

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were about to kill one of their number, "Are other groups also doing this?" In other words, is it the socially heroic thing to do, or are we being arbitrary about identifying evil? Each person wants his life to be a marker for good as his group defines it. Men work their programs of heroism according to the standard cultural scenarios, from Pontius Pilate through Eichmann and Calley. It is as Hegel long ago said: men cause evil out of good intentions, not out of wicked ones. Men cause evil by wanting heroically to triumph over it, because man is a frightened animal who tries to triumph, an animal who will not admit his own insignificance, that he cannot perpetuate himself and his group forever, that no one is invulnerable no matter how much of the blood of others is spilled to try to demonstrate it.

Another way of summing up this whole matter is to contrast Hegel's view of evil out of good intentions with Freud's view, which was very specifically focused on evil motives. Freud saw evil as a fatality for man, forever locked in the human breast. This is what gave Freud such a dim view of the future of man. Many eyes looked to a man of his greatness for a prophecy on human possibilities, but he refused to pose as the magician-seer and give men the false comfort of prediction. As he put it in a late writing:

I have not the courage to rise up before my fellow-men as a prophet, and I bow to their reproach that I can offer them no consolation.

This is a heavy confession by one of history's greatest students of men; but I am citing it not for its honesty or humility, but because of the reason for its pathos. The future of man was problematic for Freud because of the instincts that have driven man and will supposedly always drive him. As he put it, right after the above admission and at the very end of his book:

The fateful question for the human species seems to me to be whether and to what extent [it] . . . will succeed in mastering . . . the human instinct of aggression and self-destruction.

The most that men can seem to do is to put a veneer of civilization and reason over this instinct; but the problem of evil is "born afresh

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with every child," as Freud wrote three years earlier, in 1927, and it takes the form of precise instinctual wishes—incest, lust for killing, cannibalism. This was man's repugnant heritage, a heritage that he seems forever destined to work upon the world. Kant's famous observation on man was now not merely a philosophical aphorism but a scientific judgment: "From the crooked wood of which man is made, nothing quite straight can be built."

Yet today we know that Freud was wrong about evil. Man is a crooked wood all right, but not in the way that Freud thought. This is a crucial difference because it means that we do not have to follow Freud on the exact grounds of his feelings for the problematic of the human future. If, instead, we follow Rank and the general science of man, we get a quite different picture of the oldest "instinctual wishes." Incest is an immortality motive, it symbolizes the idea of self-fertilization, as Jung has so well written—the defeat of biology and the fatality of species propagation. For the child in the family it may be an identity motive, a way of immediately becoming an individual and stepping out of the collective role of obedient child by breaking up the family ideology, as Rank so brilliantly argued. Historically, the brother-sister marriage of ancient kings like the Pharaohs must have been a way of preserviing and increasing the precious mana power that the king possessed. Cannibalism, it is true, has often been motivated by sheer appetite for meat, the pleasures of incorporation of a purely sensual kind, quite tree of any spiritual overtones. But as just noted, much of the time the motive is one of mana power. Which largely explains why cannibalism becomes uniformly repugnant to men when the spirit-power beliefs that sustained it are left behind; if it were a matter of instinctual appetite, it would be more tenacious. And as for the lust for killing, this too, we now know, is largely a psychological problem; it is not primarily a matter of the satisfaction of vicious animal aggression. We know that men often kill with appetite and excitement, as well as real dedication, but this is only logical for animals who are born hunters and who enjoy the feeling of maximizing their organismic powers at the expense of a trapped and helpless prey.

This much evolution and some million years of prehistory may have given us; but to talk about satisfying one's appetites for purity

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and heroism with a certain relish and style is not to say that this relish is itself the motive for the appetite. Freud thought it was man's appetite that undid him, but actually it is his animal limitation as we now understand it. The tragedy of evolution is that it created a limited animal with unlimited horizons. Man is the only animal that is not armed with the natural instinctive mechanisms or programming for shrinking his world down to a size that he can automatically act on. This means that men have to artificially and arbitrarily restrict their intake of experience and focus their output of decisive action. Men have to keep from going mad by biting off small pieces of reality which they can get some command over and some organismic satisfaction from. This means that their noblest passions are played out in the most narrow and unreflective ways, and this is what undoes them. From this point of view the main problematic for the future of man has to be expressed in the following paradox: Man is an animal who must fetishize in order to survive and to have "normal mental health." But this shrinkage of vision that permits him to survive also at the same time prevents him from having the overall understanding he needs to plan for and control the effects of his shrinkage of experience. A paradox this bitter sends a chill through all reflective men. If Freud's famous "fateful question for the human species" was not exactly the right one, the paradox is no less fateful. It seems that the experiment of man may well prove to be an evolutionary dead end, an impossible animal—one who, individually, needs for healthy action the very conduct that, on a general level, is destructive to him. It is maddeningly perverse. And even if we bring Freud's views on evil into line with Hegel's, there is no way of denying that Freud's pessimism about the future is just as securely based as if man did actually have evil motives.

But it does influence the whole perspective on history which I am sketching here. History and its incredible tragedy and drivenness then become a record of understandable folly. It is the career of a frightened animal who must lie in order to live—or, better, in order to live the distinctive style that his nature fits him for. The thing that feeds the great destructiveness of history is that men give their entire allegiance to their own group; and each group is a codified hero system. Which is another way of saying that societies are

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standardized systems of death denial; they give structure to the formulas for heroic transcendence. History can then be looked at as a succession of immortality ideologies, or as a mixture at any time of several of these ideologies. We can ask about any epoch, What are the social forms of heroism available? And we can take a sweep over history and see how these forms vary and how they animate each epoch. For primitive man, who practiced the ritual renewal of nature, each person could be a cosmic hero of a quite definite kind: he could contribute with his powers and observances to the replenishment of cosmic life. Gradually, as societies became more complex and differentiated into classes, cosmic heroism became the property of special classes like divine kings and the military, who were charged with the renewal of nature and the protection of the group by means of their own special powers. And so the situation developed where men could be heroic only by following orders. Men had given the mandate of power and expiation to their leader-heroes, and so salvation had to be mediated to them by these figures. In a primitive hunting band or a tribe the leader cannot compel anyone to go to war; in the kingship and the state the subjects have no choice. They now serve in warfare heroism for the divine king who provides his own power in victory and bathes the survivors in it. With the rise of money coinage one could be a money hero and privately protect himself and his offspring by the accumulation of visible gold-power. With Christianity something new came into the world: the heroism of renunciation of this world and the satisfactions of this life, which is why the pagans thought Christianity was crazy. It was a sort of antiheroism by an animal who denied life in order to deny evil. Buddhism did the same thing even more extremely, denying all possible worlds. In modern times, with the Enlightenment, began again a new paganism of the exploitation and enjoyment of earthly life, partly as a reaction against the Christian renunciation of the world. Now a new type of productive and scientific hero came into prominence, and we are still living this today. More cars produced by Detroit, higher stock-market prices, more profits, more goods moving—all this equals more heroism. And with the French Revolution another type of modern hero was codified: the revolutionary hero who will bring

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an end to injustice and evil once and for all, by bringing into being a new utopian society perfect in its purity.

Psychology

This is hardly a complete catalogue of culturally codified heroics, but it is a good representation of the ideologies that have taken such a toll of life; in each of the above examples masses of human lives have been piled up in order for the cultural transcendence to be achieved. And there is nothing "perverse" about it because it represents the expression of the fullest expansive life of the heroic animal. We can talk for a century about what causes human aggression; we can try to find the springs in animal instincts, or we can try to find them in bottled-up hatreds due to frustration or in some kind of miscarried experiences of early years, of poor child handling and training. All these would be true, but still trivial because men kill out of joy, in the experience of expansive transcendence over evil. This poses an immense problem for social theory, a problem that we have utterly failed to be clear about. If men kill out of heroic joy, in what direction do we program for improvements in human nature? What are we going to improve if men work evil out of the impulse to righteousness and goodness? What kind of child-rearing programs are we going to promote—with Fromm, Horney, et al.—in order to bring in the humanistic millenium, if men are aggressive in order to expand life, if aggression in the service of life is man's highest creative act? If we were to be logical, these childhood programs would have to be something that eliminates joy and heroic self-expansion in order to be effective for peace. And how could we ever get controlled child-rearing programs without the most oppressive social regulation?

The cataloguing of maddening dilemmas such as these are, for utopian thought, could probably be continued to fill a whole book; let me add merely a few more. We know that to be human is to be neurotic in some ways and to some degree; there is no way to become an adult without serious twisting of one's perceptions of

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the world. Even more, it is not the especially twisted people who are most dangerous: coprophiliacs are harmless, rapists do not do the damage to life that idealistic leaders do. Also, leaders are a function of the "normal" urges of masses to some large extent; this means that even psychically crippled leaders are an expression of the widespread urge to heroic transcendence. Dr. Strangelove was surely a psychic cripple, but he was not an evil genius who moved everyone around him to his will; he was simply one clever computer in a vast idealistic program to guarantee the survival of the "free world." Today we are living the grotesque spectacle of the poisoning of the earth by the nineteenth-century hero system of unrestrained material production. This is perhaps the greatest and most pervasive evil to have emerged in all of history, and it may even eventually defeat all of mankind. Still there are no "twisted" people whom we can hold responsible for this.

I know all this is more or less obvious, but it puts our discussion on the proper plane; it teaches us one great lesson—a pill that for modern man may be the bitterest of all to swallow—namely, that we seem to be unable to approach the problem of human evil from the side of psychology . Freud, who gave us the ideal of the psychological liberation of man, also gave us many glimpses of its limitations. I am not referring here to his cynicism about what men may accomplish because of the perversity of their natures, but rather to his admission that there is no dependable line between normal and abnormal in affairs of the human world . In the most characteristic human activity—love— we see the most distortion of reality . Talking about the distortions of transference-love, Freud says:

it is to a high degree lacking in regard for reality, is less sensible, less concerned about consequences, more blind in its estimation of the person loved, than we are willing to admit of normal love.

And then he is forced to take most of this back, honest thinker that he is, by concluding that:

We should not forget, however, that it is precisely these departures from the norm that make up the essential element in the condition of being in love.

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In other words, transference is the only ideality that man has. It was no news to Freud that the ability to love and to believe is a matter of susceptibility to illusion. He prided himself on being a stoical scientist who had transcended the props of illusion, yet he retained his faith in science—in psychoanalysis—as his particular hero system. This is the same as saying that all hero systems are based on illusion except one's own, which is somehow in a special, privileged place, as it given in nature herself. Rank got right at the heart of Freud's dilemma:

Just as he himself could so easily confess his agnosticism while he had created for himself a private religion, it seems that, even in his intellectual and rational achievements, he still had to express and assert his irrational needs by at least fighting for and about his rational ideas.

This is perfect. It means that Freud, too, was not exempt from the need to fit himself into a scheme of cosmic heroism, an immortality ideology that had to be taken on faith. This is why Rank saw the need to go "beyond psychology": it cannot by itself substitute for a hero system unless it is—as it was for Freud—the hero system that guaranteed him immortality. This is the meaning of Rank's critique of psychology as "self-deception." It cannot contain the immortality urge characteristic of life. It is just another ideology "which is gradually trying to supplant religious and moral ideology," but "is only partially qualified to do this, because it is a preponderantly negative and disintegrating ideology." In other words, all that psychology has really accomplished is to make the inner life the subject matter of science, and in doing this it dissipated the idea of the soul. But it was the soul which once linked man's inner life to a transcendent scheme of cosmic heroism. Now the individual is stuck with himself and with an inner life that he can only analyze away as a product of social conditioning. Psychological introspection took cosmic heroics and made them self-reflective and isolated. At best it gives the person a new self-acceptance—but this is not what man wants or needs: one cannot generate a self-created hero system unless he is mad. Only pure maroissistic megalomania can banish guilt.

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It was on the point of guilt, as Rank saw, that Freud's system of heroism fell down. He admonishes Freud with the didactic mocking of one who possesses a clearly superior conceptualization:

It is with his therapeutic attempt to remove the guilt by tracing it back "causally" to the individual's experience in childhood that Freud steps in. How presumptuous, and at the same time, naive, is this idea of simply removing human guilt by explaining it causally as "neurotic"!

Exactly. Guilt is a reflection of the problem of acting in the universe; only partly is it connected to the accidents of one's birth and early experience. Guilt, as the existentialists put it, is the guilt of being itself. It reflects the self-conscious animal's bafflement at having emerged from nature, at sticking out too much without knowing what for, at not being able to securely place himself in an eternal meaning system. How presumptuous of psychology to claim to be able to handle a problem of these dimensions. As Progoff has so brilliantly summed up psychology after Freud, it all culminates once again in a recognition of the magnitude of the problem of cosmic heroism.

This is what Adler meant when he summed up in a simplifed way a basic insight of his whole life's work, "All neurosis is vanity."

I do find myself frequently having precisely this thought when encountering mentally disturbed people on the streets of LA and OC. There is an unmistakable arrogance and self-regard, all the same whether mere neurosis or full-blown psychosis; all the same whether fallen-from-grace or untouchable-from-the-start. It is very noticeable and impossible to ignore.

(And if this is pure projection on my part . . . I guess I have to own it, then, don't I?!)

Neurosis, in other words, reflects the incapacity of the individual to heroically transcend himself; when he tries in one way or another, it is plainly vain. We are back again to a famous fruit of Rank's work too, his insight that neurosis "is at bottom always only incapacity for illusion." But we are back to it with a vengeance and with the broadest possible contemporary understanding. Transterence represents not only the necessary and inevitable, but the most creative distortion of reality. As Buber said, reality for man is something he must imagine, search out in the eyes of his fellows, with their gleam of passionate dedication. This is also what Jung intimates about the vitality of transference when he calls it "Kinship libido." This means that men join together their individual pulsations in a gamble toward something transcendent. Life imagines its own significance and strains to justify its beliefs. It is as though the life force itself needed illusion in order to further itself.

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Logically, then, the ideal creativity for man would strain toward the grandest illusion.

The Science of Man

Well, obviously, none of this has been unimpeachable to the critics over the years. Words like "irrationality," "illusion," "wilful and heroic dedication"—these rub many people the wrong way. They have hardly helped make our world any better, especially in modern times. Erich Fromm, for example, impugned Rank's whole system of thought by arguing how perfectly suited it was as a philosophy for fascists. The essay in which this was done was not an essay to bring any credit to Fromm as a thinker; but it was animated in part at least by the demonic crisis of the times, by Hitlerism, and in spite of its shabbiness it did convey a truth, the need to be wary of life-enhancing illusions.

It is precisely at this point that the science of man comes in. We know that Nazism was a viable hero system that lived the illusion of the defeat of evil on earth. We know the terrifying dynamic of victimage and scapegoating all across history, and we know what it means—the offering of the other's body in order to buy off one's own death, the sadistic formula par excellence: break the bones and spill the blood of the victim in the service of some "higher truth" that the sacrificers alone possess. To treat the body with the same scorn that God seems to treat it is to draw closer to Him. Well, we know these things only too well in our time. The problem is what to do with them. Men cannot abandon the heroic. If we say that the irrational or mythical is part of human groping for transcendence, we do not give it any blanket approval. But groups of men can do what they have always done—argue about heroism, assess the costs of it, show that it is self-defeating, a fantasy, a dangerous illusion and not one that is life-enhancing and ennobling. As Paul Pruyser so well put it, "The great question is: If illusions are needed, how can we have those that are capable of correction, and how can we have those that will not deteriorate into delusions?" If men

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live in myths and not absolutes, there is nothing we can do or say about that. But we can argue for nondestructive myths ; this is the task of what would be a general science of society.*

I have argued elsewhere that one very graphic way of looking at mental illness is to see it as the laying onto others of one's own hyperfears of life and death. From this perspective we can also see that leaders of nations, citizens of so-called democracies, "normal men" are also doing the very same thing all the time: laying their power-expiation immunity trip onto everyone else. Today the whole world is already becoming uncomfortable with the repeated "war games" and hydrogen-bomb tests by nations on power trips, tests that lay their danger onto innocent and powerless neighbors. In a way it is the drama of the family and the Feifferian love affair writ large across the face of the planet, the "family" of nations. There are no particular leaders or special councils of elite to blame in all this, simply because most people identify with the symbols of power and agree to them. The nation offers immortality to all its members. Again, Erich Fromm was wrong to argue that psychically crippled people, what he calls "necrophilic characters," do evil things by valuing death over life and so lay waste to life because it makes them uncomfortable. Life makes whole nations of normal people uncomfortable, and hence the serene accord and abandon with which men have defeated themselves all through history.

This is the great weakness, as we have now discovered, of Enlightenment rationalism, the easy hope that by the spread of reason men will stand up to their full size and renounce irrationality. The Enlightenment thinkers understood well the dangers of the mass mind, and they thought that by the spread of science and education all this could change. The great Russian sociologist Nikolai Mikhailovsky had already singled out the hero as the enemy of democracy, the one who causes others to yield their wills because of the safety he offers them. The thing that had to be done was to prevent society from turning the individual into a tool for the sake

* This admission of the need for guiding heroic myths, and at the same time the plea to be wary of their costs, reconciles a long-standing argument in social theory: the challenge that Georges Sorel threw down in his critique of reason as a guide in social life. Social scientists had to admit that Sorel had something, yet at the same time they could not admit it, since it seemed to leave them no role as the representatives of reason.

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of social efficiency and safety. How could the infringement of individuality be overcome? Mikhailovsky answered in the same vein as modern humanist psychiatrists: by giving the individual the opportunity for harmonious development. At about the same time that other great Enlightenment man, Emerson, made his famous plea for self-reliance, for persons with full and independent insides so that they could have the stability to withstand herd enthusiasms and herd fears.

This whole tradition was brought up to date by Herbert Marcuse in a brilliant essay on the ideology of death. He argued that death has always been used by leaders and elites as an ideology to get the masses to conform and to yield up their autonomy. Leaders win allegiance to the cultural causa sui project because it protects against vulnerability. The polis, the state, god—all these are symbols of infallibility in which the masses willingly embed their fearful freedoms. There we have it: the culmination of the Enlightenment in a proper focus on the fundamental dynamics of mass slavishness. On the highest level of sophistication we know in detail what men fear and how they deny that fear. There is a single line from Emerson through Mikhailovsky up to Fromm and Marcuse.

But wait. We said that Enlightenment rationalism was too easy a creed, and so we would expect to see this weakness in all its thinkers, and Marcuse is no exception when he naively says:

. . . death [is] the ultimate cause of all anxiety, [and] sustains unfreedom. Man is not free as long as death has not become really "his own," that is, as long as it has not been brought under his autonomy.

Alas, the fact is that men do not have any autonomy under which to bring things . This great and fundamental problem for the whole career of Enlightenment science was posed by Rank:

Whether the individual is at all in a position to grow beyond . . . [some kind of transference justification, some form of moral dependence] and to affirm and accept himself from himself cannot be said. Only in the creative type does this seem possible to some extent. . . .

But it can be said, and Rank says it: even the highest, most individuated creative type can only manage autonomy to some extent.

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The fact is that men cannot and do not stand on their own powers; therefore they cannot make death "their own." Moral dependence—guilt—is a natural motive of the human condition and has to be absolved from something beyond oneself. One young revolutionary once admonished me in saying that "guilt is not a motive"; he never saw that his guilt was absorbed by submission to the revolutionary cell. The weakness of the Enlightenment, then, was that it did not understand human nature—and it apparently still does not. Marcuse, in an eloquent line, asks for "the good conscience to be a coward," the uprooting of heroic sublimation. But this is too easy: even it men admit they are cowards, they still want to be saved. There is no "harmonious development," no child-rearing program, no self-reliance that would take away from men their need for a "beyond" on which to base the meaning of their lives. The fallacy of vulgar Marxism was that it overlooked the depth and universality of the fear of death; Marcuse has remedied this. The other fallacy was to fail to see the naturalness of existential guilt—and here Marcuse likewise fails. The task of social theory is to show how society aggravates and uses natural fears, but there is no way to get rid of the fears simply by showing how leaders use them or by saying that men must "take them in hand." Men will still take one another's heads because their own heads stick out and they feel exposed and guilty. The task of social theory is not to explain guilt away or to absorb it unthinkingly in still another destructive ideology, but to neutralize it and give it expression in truly creative and life-enhancing ideologies.

The question we are left with, then, is to whom does one expiate? So far as I can see, this is the dénouement of the Enlightenment quest for a science of society. It will be some combination of Marxist critical thought and a tragic dimension, a perspective on the inevitabilities of human unfreedom. In this, the science would share a place with historical religions: they are all critiques of false perceptions, of ignoble hero systems. A science of society, in other words, will be a study similar to the one envisaged by Old Testament prophets, Augustine, Kierkegaard, Max Scheler, William Hocking: it will be a critique of idolatry , of the costs of a too narrow focus for the dramatization of man's need for power and expiation.

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As Norman Brown so well summed it up in three brilliant pages, the prophetic function of religion is the same as the function of psychoanalysis: the "return of the repressed," the release from the unconscious of true perceptions of empirical reality in place of the wishful cultural and private fantasies we put there. Both religion and psychoanalysis show man his basic creatureliness and attempt to pull the scales of his sublimations from his eyes. Both religion and psychoanalysis have discovered the same source of illusion: the fear of death which cripples life. Also religion has the same difficult mission as Freud: to overcome the fear of self-knowledge. Self-knowledge is the hardest human task because it risks revealing to the person how his self-esteem was built; on the powers of others in order to deny his own creatureliness and death. Character is the vital lie that covers over the painful ambiguities of man's worm-godlikeness—the despair of the human condition, the miraculousness of it tightly interwoven with the stink and decay of it. Religion as unrepression would reveal both truths about man: his wormlikeness as well as his godlikeness. Men deny both in order to live tranquilly in the world. Religion overcame this double denial by maintaining that for God everything is possible. What seems to man to be fixed and determined for all time, beyond human wormlike powers, is for God free and open, to do with what He will.

This gave the possibility of a new heroism, the heroism of sainthood. This meant living in primary awe at the miracle of the created object—including oneself in one's own godlikeness. Remember the awesome fascination of St. Francis with the revelations of the everyday world—a bird, a flower. It also meant unafraidness of one's own death, because of the incomparable majesty and power of God. And so religion overcomes the specific problems of fear-stricken animals, while at the same time showing them what empirical reality really is. If we were not fear-stricken animals who repressed awareness of ourselves and our world, then we would live in peace and unafraid of death, trusting to the Creator God and celebrating His creation. The ideal of religious sainthood, like that of psychoanalysis, is thus the opening up of perception: this is where religion and science meet.

But I am not saying that the science of society is merged into organized religion. Far from it. We know only too well how easily

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traditional religious heroism has given way to the hero systems of the secular societies. Today religionists wonder why youth has abandoned the churches, not wanting to realize that it is precisely because organized religion openly subscribes to a commercial-industrial hero system that is almost openly defunct; it so obviously denies reality, builds war machines against death, and banishes sacredness with bureaucratic dedication. Men are treated as things and the world is pulled down to their size. The churches subscribe to this empty heroics of possession, display, manipulation. I think that today Christianity is in trouble not because its myths are dead, but because it does not offer its ideal of heroic sainthood as an immediate personal one to be lived by all believers.

Be careful what you wish for.

In a perverse way, the churches have turned their backs both on the miraculousness of creation and on the need to do something heroic in this world . The early promise of Christianity was to bring about once and for all the social justice that the ancient world was crying for; Christianity never fulfilled this promise, and is as far away from it today as ever. No wonder it has trouble being taken seriously as a hero system. Even worse, as they have done all through history the churches still bless unheroic wars and sanctify group hatred and victimage. It is an age-old story known to all, so there is no point in lingering on it. But these kinds of betrayal of an ideal heroism seem to be more and more obvious to today's youth. They are even becoming obvious to the organized religions themselves, which are wondering how to divorce themselves from defunct hero systems and recapture the imaginations and the heroic impulses that are stifled in the youth. One way, of course, is by a reaffirmation of traditional evangelism, which still seems to offer a way to overcome exaggerated fears of life and death by heroic dedication to special purity and worthiness. There is no easy way out of the dilemma, as Tillich and others have so well written; organized society seems to represent a necessary denial of religious heroism. In the United States today courageous priests like Daniel Berrigan are again proving this truth: that society will move against religious sainthood (heroism) when it poses a threat to its own system of heroic apotheosis, no matter how self-defeating and immoral that system has become.

Also, if we say that the science of society is partly immersed in

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a tragic perspective, this should not give any comfort to dogmatic conservatives. Man simply cannot accept human limitations as inevitable in the scheme of things. If we talk about the "Devil" side of human nature and about man's depravity, we cannot be fatalistic or cynical about them. If we are skeptical about utopia and acknowledge the Devil, it is only the better to fight for the angel side. Today there is a real onslaught of intellectual conservatism, recruiting some of our best thinkers and trying very adroitly to discredit leftist thought. It is all right to glorify thinkers like Edmund Burke and to offer profound theological and philosophical commentaries on the tragedies of the human condition, on the follies of history, on the natural limitations of man. But this is not offered as a corrective , but as a substitute for social action, for the achievement of social justice, as an apologetic for the system as it is, for a traditional herd patriotism. This is what makes most "intellectual and moral conservatism" today fundamentally dishonest and hypocritical.

I agree that Marxism in its own dogmatic form has to be richly supplemented by a psychology that shows how men welcome unfreedom and how the basic motives of human nature remain unchanged. But I also know that differences in talent are not so biological or hereditary as conservatives oftèn want to make out. Nor is freedom to obey and to delegate one's powers as free as they like to imagine. Sure, society goes on because of a silent accord by the majority that they prefer structure to chaos, and are willing to be lulled to sleep because of the security and ease it offers them. But it also holds over their heads the ideology of death, power, immortality—just as shamans and kings once did—and dominates them with it. The sophisticated Marxian question has to be asked in each society and in each epoch: how do we get rid of the power to mystify? The talents and the processes of mesmerization and mystification have to be exposed. Which is another way of saying that we have to work against both structural and psychological unfreedom in society. The task of science would be to expose both of these dimensions.

One of the reasons for our present disillusionment with theory in the social sciences is that it has done very little in this liberating direction. Even those intelligent social scientists who attempt a

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necessary balance between conservative and Marxist perspectives are amiss in this. If we read the last three pages of Gerhard Lenski's important book Power and Privilege, we get a vista of the future—but it is such a slow, patient, scientific future, still unrelated to the pressing problems of an insane world. All he seems to want to present us with is an indefinite program extending far into the unknown future, devoted to patient checking, refining, extending the blend of conservatism and Marxism. I am hardly saying that social theory should stop dead and not be perfected; what I am saying is that a general critical science of society that unites the best of both wings of thought is a present reality, and need not be delayed. We have, as of today, a powerful critique of hero systems, of systems of death denial and the toll that they take. It is a toll of unfulfilled life based on a continuing denial of social justice; it is a toll of internal victimage based on the inequality of social classes and the state repression of freedom; it is a toll of external victimage that helps siphon off internal social discontent and transform magically social problems into military adventures. Whatever form of government uses victimage, the use is still the same: to purify evil social arrangements, distract attention from the failure to solve internal problems. Scientists must expose these things from their own scientitic torums. In science, as in authentic religion, there is no easy refuge for empty-headed patriotism, or for putting off to some future date the exposure of large-scale social lies.

I don't see why conservatives and radicals could not unite on such a science, if their sentiments are where their words are. Both believe in free public information, increasing the awareness of the masses as well as their responsibility. Both wings of thought agree on limiting the authority of the leaders, exposing their talents tor mesmerization and their shortcomings. This is, after all, the dearest and grandest feature of a democracy, that it tries to keep these critical functions alive. The problem has always been that the leader is the one who usually is the grandest patriot, which means the one who embraces the ongoing system of death denial with the heartiest hug, the hottest tears, and the least critical distance. As Zilboorg pointed out so penetratingly, the leader lives with his head full into the clouds of the cultural symbols; he lives in an abstract world, a world detached from concrete realities of hunger, suffer-

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ing, death; his feet are off the ground, he carries out his duties much like funeral directors and men who perform autopsies or executions—in a kind of emotional and psychological divorce from the realities of what he is doing. The result is that the leader is actually in a state of limited responsibility to human beings in this world—and what power he has in this state! The whole thing is lopsided and rather eerie—like compulsive neurosis or psychosis, says Zilboorg. Words, symbols, shadowboxing—no wonder so much pulsating life is so serenely ground up by the nation-states.

It is all too true, alas, but we do not live in an ideal world. If we wanted to imagine such a world, give in to utopian fantasies, we already know what we would want our leaders to be like: persons who abstracted and objected least, who took each single life and its suffering full in the face as it is. Which is another way of saying that they would know the reality of death as a primary problem. We might even let our musings go wild while we are at it, and imagine that we would choose leaders for exactly this quality: that they themselves were conscious of their own fear of life and death, and of the cultural system as a way of heroic transcendence—but a way that is not absolute, that is relative and not timeless. This might be another way of saying that we would want our leaders to be "well- analyzed" men, except that even the best analysis does not guarantee to produce this level of self-conscious, tragic sophistication.

Yet, democracy does encroach on utopia a little bit, because it already addresses itself to the problem of mystification by free flow of self-criticism . We could carry the utopian musings further and say that the gauge of a truly free society would be the extent to which it admitted its own central fear of death and questioned its own system of heroic transcendence—and this is precisely what democracy is doing much of the time. This is why authoritarians always scoff at it: it seems ridiculously intent on discrediting itself. The free flow of criticism, satire, art, and science is a continuous attack on the cultural fiction—which is why totalitarians from Plato to Mao have to control these things, as has long been known. It we look at the dénouement of psychiatry and social science today, they represent a fairly thorough self-revelation of the fictional nature of human meanings—and nothing is theoretically more powerfully liberating than that. Lifton has even detected self-mockery and

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caricature as peculiar signs of a new type of modern man who is attempting to transcend the horror and absurdity of his cultural world.

Conclusion

If I wanted to give in weakly to the most utopian fantasy I know, it would be one that pictures a world-scientific body composed of leading minds in all fields, working under an agreed general theory of human unhappiness. They would reveal to mankind the reasons for its self-created unhappiness and self-induced defeat; they would explain how each society is a hero system which embodies in itself a dramatization of power and expiation; how this is at once its peculiar beauty and its destructive demonism; how men defeat themselves by trying to bring absolute purity and goodness into the world. They would argue and propagandize for the nonabsoluteness of the many different hero systems in the family of nations, and make public a continuing assessment of the costs of mankind's impossible aims and paradoxes: how a given society is trying too hard to get rid of guilt and the terror of death by laying its trip on a neighbor. Then men might struggle, even in anguish, to come to terms with themselves and their world.

Yet I know that this is a fantasy; I can imagine how popular and influential such a body would be on the planet; it would be the perfect scapegoat for all nations. And so, like a true Enlightenment dreamer, now supposedly sobered by experience, I turn my gaze to the stars and imagine how wiser visitors from some other planet would admire such a world-scientific body. But nothing, then, changes: must we scientists still despair of the masses of men and forever turn our yearnings to the Fredericks and the Catherines—but now in outer-space garb? Or perhaps, like the monks in Walter Miller's great science-fiction tale A Canticle for Leibowitz, we should rocket our carefully shepherded manuscripts from this planet to another; and when that one, too, falls into ashes for having ignored the wisdom about evil that we have so painfully compiled, rocket them still again to another world—a sort of eternal pilgrim-

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age into space, looking for a place where men will finally take command of their drivenness.

Fortunately, no one mind can pose as an authority on the future; the manifold of events is so complex that it is fraud for the intellectual to want to be taken seriously as prophet, either in his fantasies or in his realities. One of the last thoughts of the great Williams James was that when all is said and done there is no advice to be given. And it a man of Freud's stature shrank back before prophecy, I surely am not going to peep any note of it at all. When we throw a wide net over the seething planet we have to admit that there is really nothing anyone can say about the possibilities for man; thinkers who have understood human nature and could take in the largest picture of history and tragedy have always shrunk back and shook their heads. Yet I think that there is a solid minimum achievement. If we can't go much beyond Freud's pessimism, at least we have subjected it to an empirical scientific statement— something that Freud did not satisfactorily do.

It seems to me that this leaves a margin for reason in the affairs of men. If men kill out of animal fears, then conceivably fears can always be examined and calmed; but if men kill out of lust, then butchery is a fatality for all time. The writer Elie Wiesel, who survived a Nazi concentration camp, summed it all up in a wistful remark during a TV interview: "Man is not human." But it is one thing to say that man is not human because he is a vicious animal, and another to say that it is because he is a frightened creature who tries to secure a victory over his limitations. Melville's moral in Billy Budd was that men need desperately to make panic look like reason. So it is the disguise of panic that makes men live in ugliness, and not the natural animal wallowing. It seems to me that this means that evil itself is now amenable to critical analysis and, conceivably, to the sway of reason. Freud speculated that it was possible that cultural developments might lie ahead which might make it possible even to renounce age-old instinctual satisfactions. It is even easier to speculate about cultural developments that might influence the fear of death and the forms of heroism, and so blunt the terrible destructiveness that they have caused.

This is truly the great gain of post-Freudian thought; it gives us a merger of science and tragedy on a sophisticated level, one where

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science does not drop out of the picture. We surely will never be able to do great things with our condition on this planet, but we can again throw something solid into the balance of irrationalism. When all is said and done about the failure of thought to influence man's fate, we have already witnessed great things in our time: Marxism has already had an enormous influence for human survival: it stopped Hitler in Russia, and it eliminated the gratuitous and age-old miseries of the most numerous people on earth. We have no way of knowing what gain will come out of Freudian thought when it is finally assimilated in its tragic and true meanings. Perhaps it will introduce just that minute measure of reason to balance destruction.