As I extolled the virtues of Wilhelm Reich in my previous
blog, here is another occasion to showcase him as the arbiter of what is right
and wrong. The liberal British press prefers to present the problem as an
intractable one while reassuring all and sundry that, yes sir, we can tell you
what’s what, such as John Gray’s recent piece in the Guardian entitled ‘The
truth about evil’ (see link below).
The title is of course rather unfortunate, especially as the
Guardian is fond to promote Russell Brand’s sense of humour, nicely expressed
in some of his ‘trews’ sketches, taking the Mickey out of all truths that are
more often than not exposed as lies. As such John Gray walks on thin ice even
when he affirms that the likes of Bush and Blair are well known as having bent
the truth themselves when they castigated Saddam Hussein as ‘evil’. Primitive
notions of ‘good’ and ‘evil’ abound and it is no surprise that the current war
against Islamic State is premised on the same values. Gray attempts a
historical analysis of ‘evil’ dating back to Zoroastrians and Manicheans, being
clever enough to say that while Blair and company may be called Manichean,
Blair’s primitive interpretation gives even the Manicheans a bad name. Gray
then cites St. Augustine as the most influential thinker to have shaped liberal
Christian understanding of ‘evil’ to this very day. He then, unwittingly hits
the nail on the head in writing:
Reflecting Augustine’s own
conflicts, the idea of original sin that he developed would play a part in the
unhealthy preoccupation with sexuality that appears throughout most of
Christianity’s history.
I will return to this crucial point later on. In the
meantime Gray credits St. Augustine with a humanistic take on evil, namely
Yet in placing the source of evil
within human beings, Augustine’s account is more humane than myths in which
evil is a sinister force that acts to subvert human goodness. Those who believe
that evil can be eradicated tend to identify themselves with the good and
attack anyone they believe stands in the way of its triumph.
The idea that evil is within all of us is later confirmed by
Gray via his hero Freud. In between he raises the question as to how Nazi
fascism as the undoubtedly worst manifestation of evil in human history so far
could come about. He cites Arendt who made the phrase ‘the banality of evil’
famous in regards to Eichmann. I other words we are all capable of the most
atrocious evil given half a chance. Such an analysis does not sit easily with
those who deny flatly that they would ever stoop so low as the Germans did,
given half a chance or not. However in another article in the Guardian (see
link below) that describes the exploits of a German Jew as a young interpreter
during the Nuremburg trials, the protagonist, one Sig Ramler, says:
“It’s
not only a German problem, it’s a human problem.”
Gray is at pains to convince us that this is the case in
general, hence present action taken against Islamic State will result only in a
pyrrhic victory, for Obama and Cameron cannot get their heads around the
‘truth’ which is Freud’s pronouncement:
“there is no likelihood of our
being able to suppress humanity’s aggressive tendencies”.
Of course Gray has no other solution than Churchill’s dictum
that he ‘sup with the devil’ if it helped to get rid of that ‘evil man’
Hitler. It’s all a question of
degrees of evil and subsequent compromises one has to make. Who decides what
degree of evil is perpetuated by Islamic State and the like? Do we need another
Hiroshima and Nagasaki? Do we need small-scale warfare from the air? Gray
hedges his bets both ways in his final analysis:
The weakness of faith-based
liberalism is that it contains nothing that helps in the choices that must be
made between different kinds and degrees of evil. Given the west’s role in
bringing about the anarchy in which the Yazidis, the Kurds and other communities
face a deadly threat, non-intervention is a morally compromised option. If
sufficient resources are available – something that cannot be taken for granted
– military action may be justified. But it is hard to see how there can be
lasting peace in territories where there is no functioning state. Our leaders
have helped create a situation that their view of the world claims cannot
exist: an intractable conflict in which there are no good outcomes.
In all of this wishy-washy meandering there is a fundamental
flaw, namely that there IS an explanation, if not solution, of the question of
evil. As noted in my previous blog, Wilhelm Reich in his Mass psychology of fascism lays bare the real causes of any kind of
fascism. Gray to his credit touches on it in noting St. Augustine’s
inadequacies with regards to repressing sexuality, the freedom of procreation,
the freedom to be creative. All oppressive ideologies start with proscribing
sexuality as deviant if not strictly controlled by a male chauvinist. Homophobia
and the denigration of women and children go hand in hand with acts of violence
against minorities, infidels, heretics and anybody who does not fall in line
with dogma. The Nazis invented the Aryan family as a blue-print for
slaughtering anyone who did not fit the picture. A pathological sexuality
imbued with insane racism put paid to Freud’s dictum that civilization is built
upon the sublimation of the libido. The German Nazis let loose a crude phallic
orgy of destruction, what with the likes of Eichmann reaching orgasms whenever
killing a Jewish baby. Freud’s sublimation idea does seem to curb the worst
excesses and it may well be that civilization as we know it today is the
somewhat schizophrenic outcome of such a milder form of the suppression of sexuality.
Reich on the other hand turns the table with his idea that a healthy sexuality
is the foundation of a society that promotes social and economic justice for
all human beings. Humans are not destructive by nature, they are creative,
pro-creative but as soon as there is the slightest suppression of this
creativity, we do indeed sublimate and end up in the worst case scenario as
pathological killers. Reich details the processes in his Mass psychology of fascism even though it is never quite clear to
me where the first impulses of suppression/oppression come from. If such
impulses are part of the human make-up we do have a problem, a problem not much
different from Freud’s assertion that ‘destructive’ behaviour is a human
potential. Reich at least reduces this possibility to almost zero as long as we
are truly creative/pro-creative, for what indeed is the point of biological
procreation and human love if we allow even one iota of destructiveness?
On a New Zealand TV ad campaign
for a ‘hope project’ an adolescent boy voices his ‘hope’ as “no fighting, no
fighting whatsoever” – play fighting included. We have a long road ahead of us
to get anywhere near there: to define good as the absence of evil (i.e. not
defining ‘good’ as the opposite’ of ‘evil’). What about a Nietzschean glimpse
of ‘beyond good and evil’? Reich’s realm is that of a healthy sexuality. The
1960s opened a small window of opportunity that was shut as soon as it let the
light through. Present conditions are dismal, as detailed by Gray in his superstitious
belief that evil lurks around every corner, and that all we can do is to
relativize it and act as confused as ever.
